iv Our Man in the Field…. David Hughes meets Sara Sheridan

'The average life expectancy of a botanical expert sent out by Kew Garden to whatever far- flung corner of the globe during the 1840s, was just sixteen weeks. Sixteen weeks after leaving these shores most of them ended up dead!'

Earlier in the summer, on a particularly charged and muggy day, I seized upon an opportunity to take a tour around one of the finest examples of a Victorian pocket park in Edinburgh— the Belgrave Crescent section of the Dean Gardens. My guide was writer and novelist Sara Sheridan, author of the Mirabelle Bevan Mysteries, whose brain I was keen to pick regarding her research for the characters in her forthcoming novel The Fair Botanists, set in and around Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in the early 1800s.

‘It was an intrepid time for botany all round,’ Sara tells me ‘and some of the characters were simply massive,’ and she briefly recounts the adventures of Scottish botanist Robert Fortune, the focus of her 2009 book, The Secret Mandarine:

'He was born in Berwickshire, the son of a gardener who, by the 1830s, was working at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. The man’s a marvel working with tropical plants in the hothouses and eventually finds himself being headhunted by the East India Company. The mission was to go to China and find tea plants. Bear in mind this is 1842, just after the Opium Wars, when the tea supply of the entire empire was nearly cut off! The plan was to set up tea plantations in India— there were already a couple, but they were failing badly and no one could figure out why. So, into China Robert Fortune goes, via Hong Kong. No prior cultural knowledge, no language skills but, fear not, he’s disguised in a wig and culturally appropriate clothing! Needless to say, he vanishes shortly after, odds stacked against him, and after the given sixteen weeks is rightly presumed dead. Eulogies are made, drinks are toasted and loved ones mourn the untimely deceased. But three years later, Robert Fortune turns up in Northern India having travelled 3000 miles over land with 15,000 tea plants and 30 or 40 Chinese tea gardeners that he’s bribed to help him complete the endeavour!'

Intrepid indeed! We walk a path sandwiched between a large lawn and a barrier hedge that hugs the drop-off down to the Water of Leith. Dotted around us is a rich variety of stunning, mature trees and a number of substantial Rhododendrons and Camellia in mid-flower. Originally there was supposed to be another side to this Crescent, but the residents clubbed together and bought the land off the builder in the 1860s. Somebody must have been working at the Botanics and snaffling seeds or cuttings, because you find many of the same plants down there. It’s all very much connected, in more ways than one; when you first look, you just see this flat lawn, but it actually connects all the way down to the Royal Botanic Garden further downstream, although the slope here is somewhat steeper. We wander past more mature trees en-route to a set of pleasingly overgrown stairs that lead down to a small stone terrace overhanging the Water of Leith: There are photos of those trees when they were just saplings. People in the area were quite wealthy and were some of the first in the country to have access to cameras, so there is a visual record of this particular garden from practically the beginning. The terrace overlooks the oft-photographed Dean Village rooftops, and the planting that surrounds us is deliberate and long-established; more Camellias and Rhododendrons in flower, but now accompanied by the heady fragrances of Rosemary and Mint from an herbaceous rockery that cuts into the hillside. A path leads on through a small flush of woodland clinging to a slope that I’m hardpressed to believe exists, since I must have walked past it countless times. The sharp hillsides amplify the bird song and the cascading Water of Leith. It’s a nice walk, but the old adage that ‘an interest in herbology changes a walk forever’ is ringing true for Sara:

'You stop, observe, and feel the interactions in the world surrounding you. Writing characters who have an interest in plants influences you to think in the same way. The opportunity to combine that with exploring historical archives and learning about the lives of the people surrounding the Botanic Garden during the Victorian period is a treat. There’s bountiful information to be discovered about the lives of the main characters floating around at the time— Regus Keeper Robert Graham, for example. I found a letter written by the famous American naturalist and ornithological illustrator John James Audubon, who visited Edinburgh in the 1820s. He went for dinner at Robert Graham’s house, later writing to a friend describing how unbelievably extravagant it was— unsurprising for a man earning £1000 a year! However, there’s much less information available about the other people, those engaged in the hands-on gardening work. But even from a botanical archive you can glean insight into how the people surrounding it might have lived and worked, and from there you can begin to build a picture of who they might have been. HR records weren’t taken at the time, so I was literally looking to see what people were getting paid to try and ascertain who they were or what their job might have been. Early on, before there was even a garden built, it seems like the groundwork was carried out by a group of women who came in to clear stones and pick over the soil on the site— but I'm still to discover the names of any of these women or where they came from…'

Our conversation is interrupted by a pair of Norfolk Terriers making their way down the path and I'm introduced to Scapa, the more rambunctious of the two, and Tattie, who remained largely indifferent to my friendly advances. With shoes duly sniffed, and the appropriate ears rubbed, Sara continued:

'I was particularly interested in the women, as so many of their contributions are neglected. There are a lot of samples in the Herbarium from Henrietta Liston, whose papers are up at the National Library of Scotland. She was the wife of a British diplomat who went to America and Constantinople (as was at the time). When they returned, they set up an amazing garden at Ratho. She was an avid gardener and a big friend of William Macnab, who was Head Gardener at the Botanics during the period. She was a very prominent woman in her day, and, like many others, her memory is not as well-preserved as it should be. Further down the social spectrum, there were two big seedswomen in Edinburgh. Both had inherited the businesses after their husbands had died, and both did bang-on jobs of steering these businesses— to the extent that they ended up as big rivals. I felt it was quite important to have the seedswomen in the book. They are very interesting characters. The older seedswoman, in particular, actually comes across as rather wicked and out to grow her business at any cost; she’s buying seeds on the side from William McNab, who’s being grossly underpaid— as most gardeners were at the time. And again, you unearth so many curious questions waiting to be answered: If William McNab is only earning £80 a year, and he’s six kids and a wife to support— a man on the cusp, educated, Head Gardener at the Botanics— but not a gentleman, what does he have to keep going on the side to get his kids, particularly his sons, educated properly? Many of the gardeners of this era worked multiple jobs because of the awful pay. You’d work as long as the light held. In summer, that was a long working day, but during the winter you could get another job that started at three or four in the afternoon, when it got dark, and work over the evening. I learned there was a gardener moonlighting as a customs officer, who was actually killed in a fight that broke out during a customs raid in the 1820s. But William McNab, in particular, I noticed, seemed to get a lot of presents— a side of ham here, a hamper there, various bits and pieces sent to him as thank-yous.'

‘Gifts?’ I ask, while tapping my index finger to my nose.

'Quite. ‘Gifts’. Might have been for access to seeds, maybe a few rare cuttings, an established plant or two, maybe even a bit of clandestine garden design for a garden just like this one. Who truly knows? But you can certainly ascertain a reasonable picture with a bit of educated guesswork and deduction…'

The Fair Botanists: Could one rare plant hold the key to a thousand riches? by Sara Sheridan is available for pre-order now, and you can follow the publication on Instagram @thefairbotanists. Sara is on Twitter @sarasheridan and on Facebook @SheridanWritesHerstory.