Was Thomasin Tunstall responsible for pushing England’s Lady Slipper orchid to the brink of extinction? Or was she a victim of the Botanical Boy's Club?
Final episode: Praised by Parkinson yet damned by Farrer
When we left off at the end of Part II, Thomasin Tunstall was sending plants to the royal apothecary and King’s botanist, John Parkinson, in London, between the 1620s and 1630s. We don’t know if he was directing her toward what plants he required or if she was sending him anything she found noteworthy. But we do know that Tunstall was no novice when it came to plants. How do we know that?
First, when Thomasin was collecting plants for Parkinson, as I mentioned earlier, she wouldn’t have simply been digging them up and sending them along. She would have needed to first find and identify them (by their foliage, flowering and habit), mark their location, return to dig them up when they were dormant without damaging their roots, package them up to make the slow journey, and then hope that they were received days later, alive and able to flourish.
Second, she was a plant aficionado. We get a hint of this because of what Parkinson himself had said, that she was “a great lover of these delights”. But there’s more. She was understood as having been one of the earliest owners, if not the earliest, of an original copy of John Gerard’s 1597 Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes. I had pointed out earlier that Tunstall’s maternal grandmother was Elizabeth Gerard (1520-?), and perhaps this was the family link that provided her with this book.
It is interesting to note that this particular volume was in successive private hands for over four hundred years since Tunstall had possession of it. Finally, in 2012 it was put up for auction at Sotheby’s and sold to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. for 35,250 GBP (that is, $65,475.30 CAN). It can now be accessed online by anyone who is interested in viewing it. The Sotheby catalogue listing reads thus:
A fine, coloured copy, with a distinguished provenance, and extensive early seventeenth-century botanical annotations by Thomasin Tunstall, the first recorded woman botanist and plant-collector in England. This copy was with the publisher and bookseller Richard Whitaker in 1632, and then went to the Capel family, later the Earls of Essex (see below), but the annotations indicate that the book had a fascinating owner before this date. One of the two seventeenth-century hands which annotate this copy gives locations to some of the plants centring on Lancashire and Yorkshire locations; they are clearly the notes of a dedicated herbalist and collector, and the only known candidate for this period and this area is Thomasin Tunstall, who lived near Hornby Castle, Lancashire. A relation of the royal equerry Sir John Tunstall, who himself had a fine garden, she is known to have corresponded with, and sent specimens to, John Parkinson, and is mentioned in his Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (1629) as “a courteous Gentlewoman, a great lover of these delights” (p.348). Parkinson mentions that Tunstall has located the wild white hellebore in “a wood or place called the Helkes, which is three miles from Ingleborough”; in the present copy the annotator has mentioned Helkes in Ingleborough as a plant location on p.976.
One of the annotations on the “Prickly Indian Fig tree” (p.1329) shows that the writer had knowledge of Parkinson’s collection, noting that the plant is to be found “in Mr. Parkinson’s gardin at the siyne of the goulden morter on Ludyat Hill” (according to the ODNB, Parkinson left his garden at Ludgate Hill for Long Acre before 1622). A different note shows acquaintance with another notable plant collector of the north-west: in several places Tunstall refers to Mr Hesketh, this being the Lancastrian Thomas Hesketh (1560-1613), who was “one of the earliest north-country botanists [and] became the source of a great deal of the botanical information used in Gerard's famous Herball” (ODNB).
You can see on these two digitized images Tunstall’s hand in an accurate colouring of the images: top, Rosa alba, R. rubra, R. provinciales and R. provinciales sive damascena — the two latter now known as Damask roses — and bottom, Helleborus niger verus (“verus” meaning true, not used in its botanical name) and Helleborastrum (a related genus to Helleborus, with many of the same properties).
And Tunstall’s notes in the book point to her interests: the identifying features of certain plants, for example the colours of the flowers and their proper names, as well as emphasizing the mention of “seeds” — both of these make sense if she was needing to identify varieties, as well as how best to collect seeds in order to propagate them.
This Herbal left Tunstall’s hands around 1632 and went to a bookseller, Richard Whittaker, before being in the possession of Arthur Capell, the 1st Baron Capell of Hadham. Capell was born into a wealthy noble family in Hertfordshire (a county just north of London), educated at Cambridge University and became an elected Member of Parliament in 1640. Let’s hope that Whitaker was the intermediary between the owner and buyer, and that Tunstall profited from the sale. His handwritten note inside the book directed to Capell indicates that should a newer impression come out, he would exchange the older for it for twenty shillings.
The 18th century author Richard Pulteney (1730-1801) gives us some interesting tidbits from his reading of Parkinson: that Tunstall exhibited great taste in cultivating her own garden, in that it was full of exotics; was well versed in botany; and that she had discovered “several curious vegetables found about Ingleborough Hill, in Lancashire; which were not known before to grow in England.”
Curious local vegetables are one thing, but exotics (if they were from abroad) must have been acquired through trade for the special plants she was able to source nearby. And if Tunstall was enterprising, as she seems to have been, she was likely propagating everything that she had acquired in her own garden, either to sell to interested wealthy customers or to those at the local market.
We have met Thomas Hesketh briefly earlier, a contemporary and acquaintance of Tunstall, who was also plant hunting in the Ingleborough area. The plants he brought to Parkinson’s attention included: Digitalis purpurea, Primula farinosa, Sedum rosea, Trollius europaeus, Rubus chamaemorus, as well as others from further afield. She would have also had access to these local plants, and likely propagated them in her own garden and perhaps sold them as well.
We know from Parkinson that Tunstall was living in the rural location of Bull-banke, near Hornby Castle. Today Bull Bank is marked by a farm on “Bank Lane” south of the River Greta, just under 5 miles north of Hornby Castle. Its closest towns are Wennington (Pop. 100) to the south and Melling-with-Wrayton (Pop. 299) to the north, but these towns oldest buildings date from the middle to late 17th century so they would have been much less populated in Tunstall’s time. That Thomasin lived here, on a lane, miles from the nearest small town, means that she was likely not only growing a garden with the plants she has acquired from the woods, and probably from other plant hunting friends, but also (I’m guessing) making ends meet with a vegetable garden, perhaps an orchard, as well as enough animals — pigs, chickens, maybe a cow or sheep and definitely a horse or two, for travel.
But what was considered entrepreneurship to a 17th century dispossessed “gentlewoman” (and persecuted Roman Catholic) would be characterized today as ecologically disruptive, unethical or even illegal. Indeed, would 17th century botanists and gardeners even be aware of how collecting wild plants could threaten their very existence? I doubt it.
But still, this is where things get dicey.
Of the plants that Tunstall collected, the Lady slipper orchid was by far the most exotic and desirable. It would have certainly brought the most money if offered up for sale. The problem was, as mentioned earlier, that it would take up to 10-12 years for this orchid to produce blooms from the time it was planted from seed. In the meantime, the only way to bring it to market more quickly was by digging up the mother plant.
M.J.Y. Foley from the University of Lancaster writes in the Watsonia (Vol. 27: 355-364, 2009), the academic journal of the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland, describing the fate of Cypripedium calceolus:
Nowadays long since extinct both at Ingleton and virtually everywhere else in England, it has been the victim of deplorable over-collection, especially in those early days. Its spectacular appearance and value as a garden plant meant that it was highly coveted. A letter noted by Curtis (1941) which was written in 1781 mentioned a man having brought about forty wild plants to sell at Settle market; plants also were on sale at nearby Ingleton. It appears to have survived at Helks Wood until the late-eighteenth century. Withering writing in 1798 quoted a Mr Thornbeck, an Ingleton surgeon, who told him that it had been “lost in Helks Wood for some years” and Dawson Turner in 1805 recorded that he had searched there for it in vain, “a gardener of Ingleton having eradicated every plant for sale” (see also Lees 1888). It lingered on in a few other parts of Craven into the twentieth century but was eventually reduced to a single, currently surviving, plant.
But it was the 19th-20th century plant hunter Reginald Farrer (1880-1920), who was born less than ten miles from where Tunstall lived, who first singled her out as the most grievous thief of this prized orchid. A lover and champion of alpines, he considered it the “Grand Duke of all our native alpines” and “a member of one of the noblest great families in the noblest race of plants”. He railed against Tunstall thus in his 1908 book, My Rock Garden, mocking Parkinson’s characterization of her as a “worthy Gentlewoman”:
“A worthy gentlewoman, indeed! O Mistress Tomasin, if only you had loved these delights a little less ruinously for future generations! Do you sleep quiet, you worthy gentlewoman, in Tunstull Church, or does your uneasy sprite still haunt the Helks Wood in vain longing to undo the wrong you did? And after Mistress Tomasin had long been as dead as the Cypripediums she sent up to Parkinson, there came a market-gardener, a base soul, animated only by love of lucre (and thus damned to a far lower Hell than the worthy if over-zealous gentlewoman), who grubbed up all the Cypripediums that she had left, and potted them up for sale. The Helks Wood, now, is an oyster for ever robbed of its pearl — unless, unless in some unsuspected nook somewhere, one gold-and-purple flower is yearly mocking at the memories of Mistress Tomasin and the wicked gardener both.”
Farrer had no evidence that Tunstall over-harvested this orchid; maybe he damned her because she is named, rather than the anonymous “base soul” mentioned later. Maybe he damned her because she was in his territory of Ingleborough, albeit three hundred years earlier. What we do know for sure is that she was the first local plant hunter who, according to Parkinson, “hath often sent mee up the rootes to London, which have borne faire flowers in my Garden”, so that he could include it in his wildly popular encyclopedia and plant, study and enjoy it in his own garden. So, beyond being paid for these “rootes”, as a plant lover herself, I would suggest that Tunstall probably thought that by providing these plants to Parkinson, she was contributing to the betterment of gardeners, botanists and apothecaries everywhere. But it was he, Parkinson, who identified its location, correctly so for posterity, but perhaps a bit too precisely, thereby making it fair game for others to search out and collect it.
So why did Reginald Farrer condemn Tunstall so theatrically when more than two centuries of plant hunters and botanists and opportunists succeeding her were really the cause of this famous orchid’s near extinction in England? Maybe it had to do with what I’ll call The Botanical Boy’s Club…
It’s helpful to know something of Farrer in order to explain his harsh criticism. What we know of his personal life apart from his travels and the plants named in his honour is sketchy; upon his death, his diaries were sent back from the Far East to his mother, who unceremoniously destroyed them. Born with a cleft palette and harelip, which required surgery, as soon as he was old enough to grow a bushy mustache, he did so to hide his deformity. He was coddled by his mother, and kept on a short leash financially, even though he was heir to the Ingleborough Estate. He remained unmarried; indeed, records strongly indicate he was a closeted homosexual. He had very few, if any, women in his circle. He became a Buddhist after traveling to Ceylon and loved whisky and chocolate. He was uncomfortable in English society and when he did spend time there, it was at his plant business, Craven Nursery. He spent much of his life amongst other male botanists and adventurers, traveling to Asia as often as he could to search out new plants — an enterprise largely paid for by the sales of his botanical books rather than his inheritance. He believed his true gift might be as a novelist (it wasn’t), and while he also dabbled in watercolour botanical painting (he was pretty good), his true legacy was in the colourful records of his plant hunting expeditions - both his books and the plants themselves. His descendent, Annie Farrer, described him as a tortured soul, and that “he lost himself in his plants.”
Sadly Farrer died and was buried in northern Burma when he was only 40, either from diphtheria or alcohol poisoning — I’m not sure which would be worse. But perhaps it is Nicola Schulman, in her 2002 book ‘A Rage for Rock Gardening: The Story of Reginald Farrer: Gardener, Writer & Plant Collector’ who describes Farrer most genuinely: a "touchy, reproachful, extremely demanding, painfully solipsistic" man. Maybe he just used Tunstall as a scapegoat and had zero interest in trying to understand her unfortunate circumstances.
It is ironic that Farrer had another Lady Slipper orchid named after him, Cypripedium farreri, which is found in the high mountains of southwestern China — half Tunstall’s Lady Slipper’s size, but just as rare. Here is a brief video showing the conditions under which this terrestrial orchid lives, and the maker at the end tells us that because of the pressure that these orchids face in regards to being collected, he cannot tell us exactly where he found this group. Indeed, the Plant Explorer section page for C. farreri on the Longwood Gardens website features a blank map when indicating its location.
And what has become of this English orchid today? The same species is also found across Europe, north to Russia and in the far East but in all these places, it is considered endangered. This is not so much due to over-collecting, which remains a concern and certainly it did take place at a greater scale in earlier centuries, but now it is habitat destruction brought about by agricultural practices as well as climate change (which affects temperatures, extreme weather conditions and the existence of pollinators). This excellent recent article describes how its future hangs in the balance despite the fact that it is legally protected in all European countries and collection of it is forbidden.
In England, the species was all but eradicated until a single plant was discovered in the 1930s in Yorkshire; it became known as the Silverdale Plant. Since its discovery, the location has been kept secret and it has even had a guard posted nearby to protect it for the several weeks in the spring while it produces those striking blooms. The fanatical interest in this spectacular orchid and its near extinction has made its propagation a priority at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Indeed, the folks at Kew have produced enough progeny to plant them out again at up to a dozen sites across Britain. By 2018, there have been 700 plants and 200 blooms reintroduced into the wild. But the plants are still attracting thieves and so in the hopes of satisfying much of the interest, conservationists have made two locations of these orchids open to the public, one at Kilnsey Park Estate in Yorkshire and another at Gait Barrows in Lancashire. But if you want to visit, be aware that the lines and wait are long!
Unfortunately, Tunstall remains vilified even today. A Welsh-based wildlife and wildflower website that has a page dedicated to the Gait Barrows National Nature Reserve has dealt her an unfair blow. It reads:
“Of all the threats that exist to our rare and beautiful wildflowers in Britian, human predation remains one of the greatest. Those selfish and obnoxious individuals who pick the flowers or dig up rare plants would do well to heed the words written about one of their kind, a Miss Thomasin Tunstall, who was responsible for so much collection and the resulting disappearance of many specimens of the Lady's Slipper Orchid in the 1600s…”
And then, to add insult to injury, it provides the offending quote from Reginald Farrer, slamming Tunstall, but attributes it falsely to John Parkinson.
I say “thank you Thomasin” for helping Parkinson chronicle the plants from your fields and forests through his publications. And I’m sorry that instead of being remembered for the keen plant lover and amateur botanist that you were, your name has been used unfairly as a rallying cry against the over-collection of plants in the wild.
Addendum: An interesting discussion took place on Wikipedia about the necessity and indeed, morality, of publishing the location in Great Britain of the threatened Silverdale plant. You can find it here. The discussion, that is.