St Helena: Napoleon’s Garden Island | Donal McCracken
Though only 10 miles by five, the remote British dependency island of St Helena has an extraordinary botanical history. Lying in the path of the trade winds on the homeward voyage of the great East India Company’s fleets from Asia, St Helena became a refreshment station and military bastion and also the resting site for exotic plants from Asia and Africa en route to Europe and sometimes (as with Captain Bligh's ‘floating garden’) to the West Indies. Many plants remain on St Helena, making it today an island botanic garden.
This talk examines that saga and the interlinked roles of the island’s public Botanic Garden, Castle Gardens and Plantation House Garden as well as the lush private gardens around Georgian farm houses.
All these were worked by indentured and enslaved gardeners, with occasional seconded soldiers on punishment duty. St Helena and its gardens were visited by the great explorer scientists of the age, such as Banks, Cook, Burchell, Roxburgh, Darwin and Joseph Hooker. And jumbled in among the saga of Australian daisies, Cape erythema and endemic giant tree ferns, there is the poignant story of Napoleon’s recreation in miniature at Longwood of Josephine’s great garden at Malmaison.
Donal McCracken was born and educated in Ireland and has been in academia for more than 40 years. He is currently emeritus professor of History at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, specialising in botanical history and Irish history.
His environmental history books include topics such as a history of British imperial botanic gardens; South African botanic gardens; Durban Botanic Gardens; plant hunting for Kew in nineteenth-century Natal; and an environmental history of Zululand. His latest botanical history is Napoleon’s Garden Island: Lost and old gardens of St Helena, South Atlantic Ocean.
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