RHS Lindley Library collection: all hail our plant hunters

Last July a fire broke out in the bowels of the Royal Horticultural Society’s headquarters on Vincent Square, London SW1. It was midday on a Friday and black smoke was pouring from the stacks of the Lindley Library.

The Lindley is one of the world’s foremost horticultural collections, divided between London and the RHS gardens at Wisley and Harlow Carr. Had the fire been a few hours later, at night or at the weekend, the losses could have been devastating.

As it was, the fire brigade arrived quickly, causing minimal chemical or water damage, and the library’s contract restorers immediately set to work on repairs to all the burned and soot-damaged items. The building itself took considerably longer, but the Lindley finally reopened two weeks ago and around 30 of its most charming items are also on display as part of The Plant Seekers, a new show at the Garden Museum in south London.

The exhibition examines the great age of plant collecting, which lasted from the late 18th century to the First World War. Wealthy collectors and scientific bodies such as the RHS dispatched botanists across the globe, often to dangerous and remote places, to bring back specimens to feed the demand from British estates and nurseries. Or, in the case of tea, to swipe an entire industry by smuggling saplings out of China to be cultivated in British India. Back in the basement of Vincent Square, Brent Elliott, the RHS historian, and Val Brooke, collections manager for the Lindley Libraries, used their new viewing room to show me some of the treasures that are now on display in Lambeth.

Val picked up a slender, discoloured metal cylinder, about the size of a cigarette, with a faded label around the barrel bearing the words “Joseph Banks”. Banks was president of the Royal Society, the first director of Kew in the late 18th century and one of the founders of the RHS. “It’s thought to have belonged to Banks, we’re not 100 per cent sure,” she said. “Look,” and she twisted it gently, “it’s a pen holder and a perpetual calendar with a seal on the end.” The perfect multipurpose gift for the plant hunter who had everything.

Brent opened a folded letter, dated January 1865, in bold handwriting. It was from Charles Darwin to George Maw, a tile manufacturer and keen amateur botanist, who was off to the Mediterranean. Darwin asks him to look for two plant species, one being the rather rare Drosophyllum lusitanicum.

“It is a thousand to one against your being able to aid me,” Darwin writes plaintively, ever the obsessive collector. Brent observed: “It’s interesting, because Maw had reviewed The Origin of Species quite critically. But Darwin thought his review was courteous and even-handed, and didn’t take offence.”

There was a round, flat red leather case containing a heavy silver medal with two nymphs cavorting about a foliage-draped herm and a picture of Banks’s Isleworth greenhouse on the back. It was awarded to the collector John Henry Lance in 1833 for his work in bringing coveted orchids back from Surinam. There was a black leather notebook taken by the gardener EA Bowles when he set off to the Alps in search of plants a century later. It is partly a scrapbook: he has stuck in his receipt from Thomas Cook & Son at Ludgate Circus for March 1911, a neatly typed travel itinerary, various Swiss train tickets and some cheery tourist postcards to punctuate his botanical notes.

One star turn will be the plant collector’s box used by George Forrest to send his finds back to London. It is made of sturdy timber with iron handles and is addressed, in paint, to Wisley “per T Cook & Son Rangoon”. By the time Forrest was travelling in Asia, in this case between 1917-20, it was rare for a trip to be funded by a single collector: his journey had been backed by a syndicate of interested parties, one of which was the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and another the RHS. The latter acted as his contact point.

Another star, deservedly so, will be one of the Lindley’s collection of plant paintings by the French artist Claude Aubriet. He travelled with his compatriot, the botanist Tournefort, in the 1690s, and is the first artist we know of to travel on a plant-hunting expedition. His paintings are vigorous, brilliantly composed watercolour and gouaches of exotics, each executed on expensive vellum and contained in a gold border. A strong green coffee plant has one of its red cherries carefully dissected to show the familiar bean, a vanilla plant has one of its long brown pods forensically opened: they manage to be both works of art and accurate scientific records. They have survived so beautifully, alive with strong colours, because they were bound in a book for several centuries.

“It’s wonderful that people will see some of the collection on show,” said Val. “Since the fire we’ve had a chance to rearrange the library and collections and we’ve created a new viewing room for workshops and tours, but pieces are still coming back after cleaning, so more developments are to come.”

Plans for the future include digitising more of the Lindley collections so that they can be seen online, and creating more interpretive displays. Meanwhile, anyone — RHS member or not – can visit the modern collections and can book in advance to see specific heritage material in the basement viewing room.

It’s worth doing so: the items on show at the Garden Museum are the tip of the iceberg. There are nursery catalogues, seed packets, postcards, early-17th-century artworks, orchid portraits, photographs on glass plates and magic lantern slides. You can see one of Humphry Repton’s Red Books, an RHS Dig for Victory box instructing people how to grow vegetables during the Second World War and the minutes from the first meeting of the London Horticultural Society — later the RHS – held at “Mr Hatchard’s House” on Piccadilly in 1804. The new show in Lambeth is a great chance to celebrate their survival.

• The Lindley Library London, 80 Vincent Square, London SW1, is open from 10am-5pm, weekdays, admission free. Book in advance to view the heritage collection (020 7821 3050; rhs.org.uk/libraries)

• The Plant Seekers runs at the Garden Museum, Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 until October 21 (020 7401 8865; gardenmuseum.org.uk)