First Botanical Collectors in Nepal: The Fern Collections of Hamilton Gardner and Wallich

This book is the story of how the first botanical collectors and plant-hunters began their exciting voyages of discovery in the previously forbidden Kingdom of Nepal, the richest botanical area of the fabled Himalaya, that was just beginning to become accessible in the early 19th century. The first was Dr. Francis Buchanan (later Francis Hamilton) in 1802-3, who was a prolific writer of detailed reports on his expeditions and whose collections went to the Natural History Museum in London, including an almost lost Flora of Nepal, which was never published. Following him the remarkable first British Ambassador to the Court of the Rajah of Nepal, the Hon. Edward Gardner, took up botany to while away the time he had on his hands from 1816-1820 while gradually creating better relations with the formerly hostile Nepalese Gorkhas. Yet his story has been almost unknown to botanists and historians alike, even though his collected herbarium-specimens survive at the Natural History Museum in London and, along with Buchanan’s, form the basis of the earliest study of Himalayan plants, David Don’s once savagely criticized, but nevertheless most important foundation-work, the Prodromus Florae Nepalensis of 1824.