Does monotropa hypopithys, or yellow bird’s nest, still grow in Mickleham, Surrey, in the woods once owned by Sir Lucas Pepys the celebrity physician who, in ministering to King George III, ‘found the stool more eloquent than the pulse?’ The question is prompted by the Bodleian’s recent acquisition of a ‘Catalogus Plantarum’ kept in the 1790s by an anonymous Botanist who roamed the south of England looking for specimens and noting them down with meticulous care in an exact italic.
The volume, snapped up from the Norfolk dealer Sam Gedge, contains some 75 alphabetically arranged pages, each including the plant’s Linnaean name, English name, the place where it was found (together with soil and situation), references to relevant published works, the season of discovery and, finally, on the facing page, ‘miscellaneous observations’.
In addition to his (less likely her) botanizing on Sir Lucas’ land, our hunter made it to rewarding spots in Norfolk, Oxfordshire and even the Isle of Wight.
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