The last post looked at William Burchell, the son of a London nurseryman who after emigrating to St Helena in 1805, began the process of cataloguing its flora and fauna and setting up a botanic garden. Frustrated by the attitude of successive governors to his work in 1810, he decided to leave to following an offer to become the botanist in Britain’s newly acquired colony at the Cape of Good Hope.
Even though the job didn’t in the end materialise, Burchell was to remain there for 5 years and wrote up his extensive journeys in Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa, published in 1822-24, a readable and detailed account of his 4,500 miles of exploration and collecting. Apart from giving”a faithful picture of occurrences and observations… even to the minutest particular” on every aspect of life, it is illustrated with his lively sketches and watercolours.
Burchell was, unlike many other plants hunters, not answerable to any organization or private patron so he could explore study and collect wherever, whatever and however he liked, and in the process he made an extraordinary contribution to science, and botany in particular.
The first person to attempt an inventory of its natural history was William Burchell, a Londoner, who emigrated there in the early 19thc and tried to establish a botanic garden, before moving on to South Africa and becoming probably “the most prolific collector of botanical and zoological specimens” the world had then known.
The Garden History Blog 
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