TRANSACTIONS BEER AND BOTANY The Suffoik years of Sir William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865) MEA ALLAN
THE recent demolition of the old brewery at Haiesworth has raised hardly a sigh in East Anglia. Though one man, watching a bulldozer race across the garden behind, crunching and crushing everything in the path of its half-track, cried out indignantly: " T h i s is sacrilege—this was a H O O K E R garden!" He was Standing by a small van stuffed with dug-out plants, and he was busy roping to its roof a pile of precious shrubs which next day would have been mashed into the mud. Permission to remove them had been given readily. No one eise wanted them. " I ' m saving t h e m , " he told me, and he drove off with the air of one who has rescued the victims of a Lucknow or a dozen fair damsels from the coils of a dragon. T h e demolition men have gone, but a little bit of Hooker history remains—in the house where lived the man who for twenty wearying years was to fight for and save Kew Gardens for the nation, and where was born his son Joseph who was to succeed him as second Director of the Gardens, Joseph the intrepid climber into the unscaled heights of the Himalaya who brought us the splendid species rhododendrons which turned a new page in garden planting and landscaping. William Jackson Hooker was born in Norwich in 1785. His father, a confidential clerk in the service of the Baring Brothers of Exeter, came to Norwich as a young man to set up a bombazine business. In his spare time he collected succulents and exotics. His mother was Lydia nee Vincent in whose family there was an artistic strain which was to Harne into genius with George Vincent, one of the best of the Norwich school of painters and famed for his landscapes of the Norfolk countryside. T h u s William Jackson Hooker inherited from his parents the love of plants and the artistry which later made Olof Swartz the botanist exclaim: " I can hardly say what I admire more in his works, his pencil or his pen. His talents are inimitable indeed." He was knighted for his services to botany. When he died in 1865 he left us the Kew we know today, 300 acres of the most famous and best-loved garden in the world. And most useful. For it was William Hooker who first became aware of how closely man was related to the vegetable world around him, of how urgently he