Research in the Economic Botany Collection

My research interests are broad, but centre on interactions between humans and plants, past and present. My methodology is based on close study of ethnobotanical artefacts and use of archive and library texts, increasingly with fieldwork too. All my projects are in collaboration with a wide range of Kew colleagues and external researchers. 

Current research based on the Economic Botany Collection falls into three themes:

Ethnobotany/economic botany collections:
​   past, present, future

Working at Kew, it's impossible to ignore the past. The work of botanists over the last 200 years is visible in the materials, foods and medicines we consume today; in the physical environment of Kew's gardens and collections, and even (as Jim Endersby as persuasively shown) in today's scientific methodologies. The Economic Botany Collection (EBC) was founded in 1847 and is a rich resource for the study all these aspects, in combination with Kew's library, art and archive collections. 

The Mobile Museum
Caroline Cornish's PhD thesis on the history of the Kew Museums led us to realise just how many ethnobotanical specimens - some 60,000 - Kew sent out to museums worldwide, mainly in the period 1850-1920. In the Mobile Museum project we are tracking down these distributions, both as a study of the role of museums in distributing objects and knowledge, and to reconnect objects with the detailed information about them still held in Kew's archives. The project is led by Prof. Felix Driver (Royal Holloway) and myself and funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Website: Mobile Museum Twitter: @KewMobileMuseum Team: Caroline Cornish (Senior Research Fellow, Royal Holloway/Kew Honorary Research Associate) | Felix Driver (Co-PI, Royal Holloway/Kew Visiting Researcher) | Laura Newman (Education historian, Royal Holloway/Kew Visiting Researcher) | Beth Wilkey (Kew Project Officer) | Jill Turner & Simon Barrow (volunteers)

Richard Spruce's Amazon collections
In the 1850s Richard Spruce sent Kew c. 300 ethnographic artefacts from the Rio Negro in the Amazon, as well as many thousands of herbarium specimens. Spruce's ethnobotanical collections have never been studied, but form a comprehensive baseline for studying human-environment relations from the 1850s to the current day. Grants from the  British Council (Newton Fund) have supported capacity building in making and using old and new biocultural collections, through workshops and training at Kew, Rio de Janeiro botanic garden, and ISA (Instituto Socioambiental) at São Gabriel da Cachoeira. The project integrates indigenous and western perspectives. Our priority for 2018 is to secure large-scale funding for this project.

Website: Kew page Team: William Milliken (Kew) | Luciana Martins (Birkbeck, University of London/Kew Visiting Researcher) | Viviane Stern da Fonseca-Kruel (Jardim Botânico​ do Rio de Janeiro) | Aloisio Cabalzar (ISA) | Márlia Coelho Ferreira (Museu Goeldi) | Lindsay Sekulowicz (artist in residence/Kew Visiting Researcher) | Jago Cooper (British Museum) | many other collaborators in Brazil and the UK

Curating biocultural collections
Kew is much the largest of the surviving economic botany collections (c. 42000 woods, 60000 plant raw materials and artefacts, and one of the very few to have been actively curated since its foundation. It presents exciting challenges, including the care of a highly diverse range of materials and formats of specimen, and the development of new purposes for what is mainly a historical collection. We have shared our experience collection development through a SYNTHESYS course and through co-editing Curating Biocultural Collections, as well as by hosting 500 researchers and students each year. Each year significant research into EBC objects is carried out by students at UCL, Royal Holloway and the Centre for Textile Conservation, University of Glasgow. We maintain close contact with other such collections, particularly in Europe, and are investigating collaborative projects. 

Website: Economic Botany Collection Team: Frances Cook (Collection Manager) | Pam Cook, Vicky Oswald, Liz Dauncey (volunteers) | Placement students (2-4 each year)

Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage
Kew has recently joined UCL's Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage project as a partner, and we look forward to the new perspectives this will bring to collections practice here. 

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Inside the Economic Botany Collection

Examining a Maori cloak made of tikumu (Celmisia).

Materials

In the era before oil, people relied on a wide range of natural products for making things. Some we still use - wood, wild rubber - others are forgotten or in decline, such as barkcloth and natural dyes. The EBC enables research into these uses on a global scale: how ere they distributed, what are the biological properties that underlie their use, and how do these uses change over the last 150 years.

Barkcloth
Our joint project Tapa: Situating Pacific Barkcloth in Time and Place is based at the Centre for Textile Conservation at Glasgow University. It combines work in botany and materials science, research conservation, and museum anthropology, and is based on study of tapa collections at Kew, the Hunterian Museum, and the National Museum of Natural History.

Kew's barkcloth collections are worldwide and other work by Emily Brennan has focused on Jamaican lace-bark (Lagetta lagetto) and her recently completed PhD on Indonesian bark-cloth (Collaborative Doctoral Award with UCL). Our African collections remain to be investigated.

Website:  Tapa: Situating Pacific Barkcloth in Time and Place Twitter: @UofG_Barkcloth Team: Frances Lennard | Andy Williams | Misa Tamura | Margaret Smith (all Centre for Textile Conservation, University of Glasgow) | Adrienne Kaeppler (Smithsonian)

Basketry
 I am working with Ruth Stungo, botanist and basketmaker, on a catalogue of Kew's baskets, taking a botanical perspective that focuses on the transformation of raw materials by processing and weaving technique to achieve the desired use. It is an innovative approach (heavily inspired by Peter Collingwood) and our first results are now in press. Thanks to Ruth, Kew has close contacts  with the UK's basket-making community and the EBC has benefitted from recent gifts of baskets from Maurice Bichard, Felicity Wood and Kay Johnson.

Team: Ruth Stungo & many advisors among members of the Basketmakers Association

Paper 
Nancy Casserley's Royal College of Art MA on the British reception of Japanese paper (washi), as viewed through the Parkes collection at Kew, has led to an exhibition, conference and book. Paper is very well represented at Kew as the 1840-60s were a period of paper shortage in Europe; in particular, the results of Thomas Routledge's experiments at the Ford paper mill are an unexplored resource. A new Partnership PhD through the TECHNE Doctoral Training Partnership is investigating the broad sweep of Kew's paper collections, and those at other museums in London and elsewhere.

Team: Francesca Kubicki (PhD student, TECHNE & Royal Holloway, University of London) | Felix Driver (C0-supervisor, Royal Holloway).

Rubber 
Vulcanised rubber was a new material when the EBC was founded, and Kew has important collections of raw materials and artefacts from Goodyear and Macintosh. These are being conserved on a rolling programme by students at UCL, and are an important resource for design history. A grant application to support a PhD project is currently in progress.

Textiles 
The EBC holds raw fibres, yarns and samples of cloth from about 300 species of plants. Pilot studies suggest these are are rich resource for studies both of textile technique, and of broader questions (highly relevant to today) regarding the adoption of novel fibres in the 19th century.

Wood 
​Adam Bowett's book Woods in British Furniture-making 1400 - 1900: An Illustrated Historical Dictionary is a great example of the use of the EBC to carry out a broad investigation of a category of material, setting it in the context of world history. I was able to resolve many botanical queries raised during Adam's project. 

Japanese paper

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Medicinal plants

Plants were the main source of medicine from prehistory to the mid-20th century. The EBC contains about 25,000 materia medica: 5000 linked to Kew's own work, 10,000 from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, 5500 from the former Chelsea College of Pharmacy, and 4000 contemporary specimens from Christine Leon's Chinese medicines project. This is the largest collection of its kind in the UK, and offers a unique perspective on medical history based on actual specimens rather than pharmacopeias. As well as representing a separate data source, such specimens also allow for the recovery of ancient DNA and phytochemicals. Current projects on materia medica include:

Cinchona
Following recataloguing of Kew's cinchona barks (supported by the Wellcome Trust) it became clear that they represented a crucial episode in the characterisation and transplantation of South American cinchona, particularly through the work of John Eliot Howard. This collection is the focus of Kim Walker's work, a Partnership PhD through the TECHNE Doctoral Training Partnership. We are also carrying out a comparative study with colleagues at the equivalent Dutch collection in Leiden.

​Team: Kim Walker (PhD student, Royal Holloway) | Felix Driver (Co-supervisor, Royal Holloway) | Nina Rønsted (Natural History Museum, University of Copenhagen) | Gerard Thijsse & Tinde van Andel (Naturalis)

Chinese Materia Medica
Chris Leon is a leading expert on macro-morphological identification of source plants, medicinal trade items and detection of herbal substitutes and counterfeits in Chinese medicine. Her research outcomes contribute to herbal medicine quality control, patient safety, ‘good practice’ guidelines in TCM research and the sustainable use of wild species. An extensive network of collaborators includes staff at IMPLAD and Hong Kong Baptist University.

Team: Christine Leon

Medicinal plants in ancient Mesopotamia
In this pilot study, led by Barbara Boeck, I am collaborating with two Assyriologists and a Kew colleague to re-examine past identifications in ancient texts and propose new ones that better fit with current botanical and linguistic evidence.

Team: Barbara Boeck ​& Ignacio Márquez Rowe (CSIC -Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales) | Shahina Ghazanfar (Kew)

19th century materia medica

Cinchona pubescens bark, collected by Richard Spruce, Ecuador

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Future directions

I have three aims for future work - and would be glad to hear from anyone interested in collaborating on these:

• Secure long-term funding for work on Richard Spruce and biocultural collections in the Amazon.
• Develop research on neglected parts of the Collection, including materia medica, textiles, Japanese lacquer, and our ancient Egyptian specimens. The latter two categories are also urgent conservation priorities.
• Develop an integrated programme of arts & humanities research at Kew, with colleagues in Kew's Library, Public Programmes and other teams, that enables a sustained approach to some of the big questions about Kew's history in relation to its current activities, Likely areas of focus include Kew's garden history (a highly neglected subject), the art history of its botanical illustrations, and the twentieth century history of Kew in relation to colonial disengagement (another almost entirely neglected subject).