KEW AND THE EMPIRE

Evening Star, Issue 19764, 14 January 1928, Page 10

KEW AND THE EMPIRE

DR HILL'S MISSION A GREAT " LIAISON " STATION BOTANY AND ECONOMICS. Kew Gardens, which lias been ah effectual agent of Imperial production for two generations, has set forth in the person of Dr Hill, the director, on a new sort of activity (states the London ‘Observer’). When the Empire Marketing Board offered Kew, out of the cool million pounds that it controls, the sum of £4,000 a .year, the intention was that one of its economic botanists should have money and leisure for oversea missions. One of the few deficiencies at Kew was a “traveller” in botanical knowledge. Dr Hill’s visit to Now Zealand and Australia, and thereafter to Java, the richest island in the world, Singapore, and Ceylon, is the first of several new ventures. Jt is intended in the future to despatch botanical cu/fcctors not only to study plant life on the spot, hut to bring back specimens, which may bo grown and multiplied at Kew and despatched thence to various parts of the Empire.

Kew has been continuously busy at the work of transferring plants from one part of the Empire to another, and has frequently, on its own initiative, suggested to one district that it could got a better species or variety from another, perhaps at the other side of the world. A good example is the recent supply of cocoa plants to the Gold Coast.

England is on the way to everywhere. Two yours ago, when East ’Africa wanted what only West Africa could supply, the honeliccnt animal could only be transferred by the process of being brought to England, bred there, and t hence .shipped to East Africa. Jnst. the same process is carried out with plants, and Kew has already established “ a very close liaison with the agricultural and botanical departments of the world,” and this has proved “ of inestimable benefit to tho dominions and colonics in the introduction of new staples and the development, of the natural vegetable, resources of the. Empire.” But now territories are being opened, and agricultural enterprise increased, and .Kew found the need of closer, more intimate, more personal touch. MOW KEW HELPS. A good part of Dr Hill’s work is merely to co-ordinate research. But it does not end there. Kew, after all, is chiolly a, place where things grow, and it is amazing how.well all sorts of exotics, .whether from tho tropics or Imm northern tundras, flourish there. It is worth while (laying the gardens a visit to-day, if only to see banana trees in fruit. That is one example of Kew’s adaptability. Botanists there might conceivably he able to help the banana growers of seini-fropieal Queensland to counter the disease that checks their prosperity. The wealth earned within the Empire by such plants as tea, coffee, cocoa, rubber, sugar, cotton, and yet more by the family of gramineous (in which bamboo is reckoned) and leguminous plants is immense, and in all of them a slight additional knowledge of the superiority of one species, or even variety, may be crucial to economic success. Scores of examples could he given. One may suffice irom the annals, not of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, but of private linns. The British manager of a cane sugar farm in East Africa, before taking up his duties, travelled from the north of the Argentine to Java to investigate varieties and a species of cane. A slightly larger sugar content or a slightly greater resistance to frost (and both were found in Java) may make the difference between success or failure in cither the Argentine or in East Africa. The Empire has slight needs as well as essential. If the Australians want to grow at homo the cricket bats that they wield with such skill, the,v would begin by communicating with Kew, in order to secure the best variety of salix—probably Caerulea alba —for the purpose. EPITOME OF THE TROPICS. Or, again, if the new capital of Australia wants English oaks and willows to decorate its site it can get them at once by writing to Kew. An example of one of the quaint uses of plants is to be seen on the Mumunbidgee and other AusTraliau rivers. They have

been made, in Horace’s phrase, uxorious, have been kiipt within firm banks, largely by aid of the slips of Babylonian willow exported a hundred years ago. The gardens at Kcw have many special advantages as a centre of botanical knowledge. The equable climate, if English people will allow the phrase, _ the great glasshouses, which epitomise the tropics, the skilled staff, now increased by the new grant, and the laboratories (though these are not perhaps altogether _ adequate), make possible direct investigation into the problems of most climes. This fact is very widely appreciated, but nevertheless the botanic needs of to-day’s Empire (the only botanically self-suf-ficing unit in the world) have not hitherto been pooled with sufficient thoroughness. in some regards Kew has lagged behind Bothainsted, where houses have just been built in which the heat and moisture of any_ climate can bo exactly mimicked, chiefly for tlie sake of the better study of both biological and botanic parasites. BEAUTY AND USE. Some horticulturists in England have long shown astonishing enterprise: witness the glory of the modern garden. They have surpassed Kcw or any agricultural authority in their worldwide searches for new plants. A French visitor to England who came to investigate our agriculture complained recently that “ everything was for beauty, nothing lor use.” He was commenting specifically on the hedgerow. A good example of this amiable heresy, prevalent in our country, is the contrast between the scientific enterprise of our gardeners and our farmers. Great firms have sent out travellers to the wildest and remotest countries to discover a new orchid or flowering shrub; and nothing in botanical science has been more thoroughgoing than the struggle to put new colors into roses, sweet peas, nemesias, gloxinias, or what not. British gardeners were recently thrilled by the discovery in Asia, through a “ traveller ” of genius, of a meconopsis bigger and bluer than anything of the sort seen before. Supposing all the energy had been put into the search for economic plants 1 Well, Kew now begins to do for the botanic wealth of the Empire what the great vanished firm of Veitch did fifty years ago for the beauty of our gardens. It is a good sign; and the search is not without a romantic aspect, as those know who are now' busy with the restoration of fertility to Palestine via British economic stations.