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!
