Jill,
Duchess of Hamilton
Christopher Humphries
Tribute to the Reverend
WILLIAM
KEBLE MARTIN
This, the first
full-length book on gardening with British native trees and shrubs,
coincides with the fortieth anniversary of the Rev. William Keble
Martin’s
Concise Flora of the British Isles in Colour.
A bestseller in 1965,
it was a landmark in nature conservation, and celebrated Keble
Martin’s lifetime of research and draughtsmanship. Thirty of his
charming drawings, in their original form as line sketches, are
published for the first time in the present book (in the 1965 book
nearly 1,400 species were specially grouped and coloured for
printing).
William Keble Martin
was born in 1877 and educated at Marlborough, where he showed such
skill at butterfly-collecting and botany that he went on to read
botany at Oxford. Here he learned how to draw specimens under a
microscope and study the flora of the British Isles. But instead of
a career in science he was ordained, and for eighteen years he
worked first as a curate and then as a vicar in the industrial
parishes of northern England and, after the outbreak of World War
One, as a chaplain to the forces in France. When peace came in 1918,
like the poet-vicar Andrew Marvell three centuries earlier, he moved
to his beloved Devon. Here he was vicar in various parishes,
including Torrington, Haccombe and Dartington. An active member of
botanical circles, he was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society in
1928, and eleven years later edited a comprehensive Flora of
Devon for the Devon Association. That year he was invited to sit
on the first Nature Reserves Committee. He retired in 1949 at the
age of 72, but still worked in the church, taking locums all over
the country; in 1965, at the age of 89, he married for the second
time. In June 1966 he received an honorary degree of Doctor of
Science from Exeter University and in the following November he was
asked by the Post Office to submit designs for an issue of wild
flower stamps; four of these were accepted and issued in April 1967.
Just before he died at the age of 92 in November 1969, he published
his autobiography, Over the Hills. After his death, his widow
Florence presented his original drawings to the Linnean Society,
together with his microscope, mounted lens and a small box of
watercolours and brushes.
PREFACE
It is a fact almost
universally acknowledged that people all over the world undervalue
and take for granted their native floras. Why this should be is
perhaps not so mysterious: the native is familiar, unremarkable and
without the stories of derring-do that so often accompany the
introduction of exotics. In the early eighteenth century, the
apothecary William Curtis found this to his cost – his beautifully
illustrated flora of London and its environs, Flora Londinensis,
was a commercial flop whereas its successor, Curtis’s Botanical
Magazine, was snapped up by a public eager to see new exotics
illustrated in colour, each accompanied by a botanical description,
a publication which is still issued today.
Yet when people are
asked what they are homesick for when away from Britain, it is often
native plants and ecosystems that they mention. ‘The bluebell woods
of Ruislip’ and ‘the beech hangers of Sarratt’ would be my
contribution here – and I only need to reflect that the former have
largely disappeared under housing estates and the latter felled by
storms to realise that these are plants under threat by population
pressure and climate change. The phenomenon of people decrying their
‘own’ floras is common in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa,
which all have particularly rich, endemic floras of their own. The
flora of the UK is much less rich by comparison: botanists call it a
‘depauperate post-glacial flora’ – one diminished in richness of
species by extinctions caused by the Ice Ages. But there is a change
afoot in the appreciation of native floras, whether rich or poor
ones. This change has been engendered by the Convention on
Biological Diversity, spawned by the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro
of 1992. Floras are now seen as a matter of national pride, to be
conserved and utilised for the national good in their own right, or
in their genes and products obtained from them, or in knowledge
about their use.
This change has
caused rapid revision of the remits of botanic gardens around the
world. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for example, long concerned
with tropical botany and particularly tropical economic botany, now
has a Millennium Seed Bank to conserve Britain’s biodiversity as
well as that of the dry tropics; it recently ran a DEFRA-funded
festival of the UK’s wild plants entitled ‘Go Wild’. This ‘return of
the native ’ has been scientifically informed by an understanding of
DNA sequencing in defining native genotypes and an increasing
understanding of the ecological basis of complex food systems in
which native plants may be important keystones. This book is aimed
at the gardener. Gardeners are often appreciated in terms of their
contribution to ‘carbon sinks’ and to the richness of wildlife in
urban and suburban gardens (compared to monocropped agricultural
fields). What is less appreciated is the potential of gardeners, in
growing native plants, to contribute to the retention of
characteristic landscapes and local distinctiveness, which may be
visual, part of local cottage industry or local myth and folklore.
All of this is covered here, along with some interesting examples of
the cultural importance of the plants in poetry. Britain’s native
plants are the frame into which later exotic introductions have been
fitted and, due to their long association with our developing
culture, they often have some of the most interesting stories
attached to them. Just as other cultures are defending the value of
their floras, we should not forget the value of our own.
