Articles
INFORMATION RECONSTRUCTION OF THE HISTORIC PLANTINGS IN DURBAN BOTANIC GARDEN
Article number
1035_12
Pages
105 – 109
Language
English
Abstract
Durban Botanic Garden is the oldest surviving botanical garden in Africa, having been founded in 1849 and moved to its present site in 1851. For some time we have been involved in auditing the existing trees in the Garden and in a project to make the Garden archives accessible on the internet.
We examined the practicalities of recovering as much information as possible about the Garden in its 19th century heyday, bearing in mind that the early planting records are lost.
Surviving evidence includes herbarium specimens held in the Kwazulu-Natal Herbarium (NH), old photographs, and a garden guide published in 1897. This includes numbered notes on over 700 trees, and a garden map on which numbers indicate the location of these trees.
Using the evidence available to us, we have established that 100 of the woody plants in the 1897 catalogue are still growing in the same positions in the garden, and one vine listed as being in the garden is still in its original position, which is now part of the SANBI Kwazulu-Natal Herbarium property.
Most of the layout of the Garden is unchanged, or only slightly modified, since the 1897 map.
It would be a worthwhile future project to attempt to deduce the herbaceous plantings from herbarium specimens and surviving correspondence.
We discuss the possibility of making digital reconstructions of the garden at various times in the past and placing these on the Gardens web site as virtual tours, and the value these would have in advertising the Garden and documenting its history.
We examined the practicalities of recovering as much information as possible about the Garden in its 19th century heyday, bearing in mind that the early planting records are lost.
Surviving evidence includes herbarium specimens held in the Kwazulu-Natal Herbarium (NH), old photographs, and a garden guide published in 1897. This includes numbered notes on over 700 trees, and a garden map on which numbers indicate the location of these trees.
Using the evidence available to us, we have established that 100 of the woody plants in the 1897 catalogue are still growing in the same positions in the garden, and one vine listed as being in the garden is still in its original position, which is now part of the SANBI Kwazulu-Natal Herbarium property.
Most of the layout of the Garden is unchanged, or only slightly modified, since the 1897 map.
It would be a worthwhile future project to attempt to deduce the herbaceous plantings from herbarium specimens and surviving correspondence.
We discuss the possibility of making digital reconstructions of the garden at various times in the past and placing these on the Gardens web site as virtual tours, and the value these would have in advertising the Garden and documenting its history.
Authors
H. Glen, D. Higginson-Keath
Keywords
history, Durban Botanic Garden, South Africa, specimens, documents
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