UKZN Veteran Academic’s Book Published in the United Kingdom

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Emeritus Professor Donal McCracken’s book on the botanical and garden history of the island of St Helena off the West African coast has been published by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in Britain.

The book - Napoleon’s Garden Island: Lost and Old Gardens of St Helena, South Atlantic Ocean - is the culmination of research work stretching back to 2006 which includes two trips to the island, where he lectured at the St Helena Museum as well as spending many hours in the African and Asian archive section of the British Library and in the extensive archives of Kew Gardens.

McCracken says the book is about the plants which were brought to St Helena from the 17^th century by British East India Company fleets on their journeys from Africa and Asia. ‘Because plant mortality was great, plants were rested on St Helena with many later being shipped on to Britain, Europe and the West Indies.

‘The famous Captain William Bligh of the mutiny on the Royal Navy’s vessel HMS Bounty-fame is in the story as it was breadfruit Bligh was carrying back from the south Pacific in 1789,’ said McCracken. ‘St Helena became a botanical hub - a botanical Dubai - and as such, alongside the interesting and threatened indigenous plants on the island, is a cornucopia of trees, shrubs and flowers from China, India, Indonesia and especially South Africa. The South African arum lily was for many years the island’s floral emblem.’

In the book, McCracken has detailed a list of Cape plants sent from Cape Town to St Helena as a gift for the former Emperor of France, Napoleon, who was an enthusiastic gardener while a captive on the island from 1815 until his death there in 1821.

The book tells of the saga of the arrival of exotic plants on the 122-square-kilometre St Helena and also investigates what plants grew in the botanically diverse plantation gardens on the island. The skilled gardeners were either enslaved Africans or indentured Chinese gardeners and McCracken delves into the lives and work of these forgotten people, identifying them where possible.

‘Today most of St Helena’s 4 000 population is descended from enslaved Africans and Asians brought to the island during the colonial era either as slaves or later as enslaved people who had been liberated from slave ships attempting to transport them across the Atlantic,’ said McCracken.

Making use of 18^th and 19^th century manuscript sources, McCracken has also compiled lists of the locations where both indigenous and exotic plants were found. He says in this way he hopes to have contributed to the preservation of the island’s local flora and has called for the establishment of an indigenous botanic garden on the island similar to those found in South Africa.

The foreword to the book was written by leading botanist on St Helena’s flora, Dr Colin Clubbe of Kew Gardens. The work is lavishly illustrated with colour plates of the island’s flora and old gardens - many never reproduced previously.

This is the second scholarly work McCracken has published recently. ‘During the COVID-19 lockdown, I decided to salvage something from the situation, so I put my head down and wrote and wrote and wrote!’

Napoleon’s Garden Island: Lost and Old Gardens of St Helena, South Atlantic Ocean is available at £35 sterling from the Kew Garden’s online bookshop https://shop.kew.org/napoleon-s-garden-island

•    McCracken is an Emeritus Professor at UKZN’s Centre for Communication, Media and Society in the School of Applied Human Sciences at the College of Humanities. He has been an academic at the University for more than 40 years.

Words: NdabaOnline

Photograph: Supplied