John Hope: Botanist of the Scottish Enlightenment

Event Details

Henry Noltie, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, presents John Hope: Botanist of the Scottish Enlightenment

Today we tend to imagine that inter-continental travel is a recent phenomenon—in fact it has always taken place, it merely took slightly longer. For example, such was the renown of the Edinburgh Medical School in the 18th century that it drew students from as far afield as Russia and India in the east, and from the American colonies (including the Caribbean) in the west. One such student was Charles Drayton, who made the transatlantic trip to study botany and materia medica in 1767 under the famed Professor John Hope. In keeping with this theme, Dr. Noltie will journey from Scotland to Charleston in 2016 to speak about the botanical information Charles Drayton brought back with him from Scotland as he made the same trip just about 250 years prior. Dr. Noltie will additionally focus on John Hope and some of his other American pupils, including Benjamin Rush, who was in the same year as Drayton, and an exciting new project that has seen the rebuilding of the house that Hope built (to designs by John Adam) to house his head gardener, as well as a lecture room that Drayton would have sat in had he arrived in Edinburgh ten years later.

Since 1986, after studying botany at Oxford and Museum Studies at Leicester, Henry Noltie has worked at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) as a curator and taxonomist. For 14 years, he worked on the Flora of Bhutan project, writing the first account of the plants of that remote Himalayan Kingdom and leading the team for its concluding years. He wrote two of the volumes of the Flora, relating to the monocots, for which he received a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. Since 2000, his work has been on historical aspects of the rich herbarium and illustrations collections of the RBGE, especially relating to India, which has combined nomenclatural research with historical and art-history studies, plus the mounting of exhibitions at the RBGE gallery, Inverleith House. His work on the Scottish Enlightenment botanist John Hope took visual materials for its starting point—the unique collection of Hope's teaching drawings preserved at the RBGE, led to the writing of a short biography in 2011. .