Leiden
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Buttercups are as we all know usually yellow. But they also come in other colors. Here's an Asian Butterfly in pretty scarlet. Still bright though wet with the drizzle which seems not to be letting up here this morning.
Bee was lucky! She found this Small Teasel in the Hortus. It's a plant quite rare 'in the wild', so we're lucky to have it protected here. It is, of course, closely related to the Common Teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, and certainly stands as high. But it has no water-collectors on the lower stem just above the root.
It's Snowdrop season and there are lots of them especially in the shadows of the Hortus.
There are many kinds of Galanthus; I thought I'd show you two of the most common. The first of the inset is the Galanthus nivalis, perhaps the most widely known. The main photo shows a form, perhaps a cultivar, of the former: Galanthus nivalis flore pleno, Double Snowdrop. As far as I know it was first painted by the Dutch artist Everhardus or Edward Kickius (1636-1701 (?) in the Book of Mary Somerset, the Duchess of Beaufort, published around 1703.
It's wet and dark here, even in the Hortus. But behind the Palm House in beds mostly out of the reach of the wind Crocuses are sprouting in the chilly rain.
Crocuses come in many kinds and I'm no expert. I hazard a guess though as to their name in this wetness: Sieber's Crocus, Crocus sieberi.
Joseph Franz Jacquin (1761-1839) in his fine catalogue (and illustrations), 1811-1816, of rare or little known plants gives a very good colored drawing of our plant. There's some discussion about who first scientifically described it. Some say it was intrepid explorer William Bartram (1739-1823) in his famous book on the natural history of the southeastern states of the US and also their native inhabitants (1773-1778). But if you turn to those pages the description doesn't quite fit the plant: its flowers are said to be rose. So naturalist Thomas Walter (1740-1789) would seem to be its author. Jacquin mentions someone else again, famous André Michaux (1746-1802); but he, too, was a Continental; and besides, in those days there was no internet to compare notes. In any case, the shrub hails from the Savannah River.
And it's quite at home as well in the Amsterdam Hortus Botanicus.
The last couple of nights have seen extraordinary weather phenomena in The Netherlands. In the north there's been an almost unnatural display of Northern Lights. And down here the day sky seems to be more blue than usual. Certainly as blue as this Two-leaved Squill raising its head toward the blue above.
Autumn is upon us but still there was a faint peppery smell in the air around this pretty, rather small-flowering Geranium. Sometimes it's called 'Black-pepper-scented Pelargonium'. Its leaves and flowers grow on relatively long stems; hence the more common name.
A synonym is Pelargonium cradockense; that's for the hills around Cradock in South Africa where it was first collected at about 1000 m altitude.
Danewort or Dwarf Elder in The Netherlands is a highly endangered species. It's good to see it protected here in the Hortus. In Dutch it's called 'Kruidvlier', that is to say: Herbal Elder. In folk medicine it was long used as a remedy for liver and kidney complaints but it's highly poisonous. Various parts of the plant have been used to make red and black ink for writing.
It is said that one of its English names - Danewort - alludes to the idea that the plant is found especially on the battlefields of the Danes. Next time I visit one, I'll make a point of searching for it!
Our fine Hortus labels this pretty Tulip incorrectly as Tulipa orphanidea. It is in fact Tulipa dasystemon.
A few days ago I wrote about father Eduard August von Regel of the Czar's garden at St Petersburg, Russia, and his son Albert, the intrepid plant collector and explorer of the eastern regions of the Russian Empire. Tulipa kolpakovskiana was found and described by them. www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/51982167721/in/photoli....
This Tulipa dasystemon was found on Albert's same trip near Almaty in the hills of the Almatinka River. It, too, was described by the elder Von Regel in 1877.
As I walked in that idyllic garden, the Amsterdam Hortus, news beeped up on my phone: a hard lockdown against Covid-19 in The Netherlands until at least January 17. The Hortus locked and out of bounds...
Anyway...
Here's a Winter Heath, Erica herbacea, in full flower. I expect to see it again soon after the 17th next month.
With one foot in the Hortus Botanicus, in the middle of Leiden, the striking P.J. Veth building: a monumental neo-gothic building that can only be admired in its entirety from the adjacent Botanical Garden. The building consisted of a three-layer Botanical Laboratory and the five-layer Herbarium,
The P.J. Veth building was taken into use in October 2017 by the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Leiden
Monkshood is one of the deadliest plants - at least to human beings - you'll find in your garden. Indeed, ancient Romans used it as a plant for executions.
All parts of the plant are highly toxic even the pollen. And it has been claimed that people have been poisioned by Monkshood honey that contains the plant's pollen (as reported by H.S. Puri in 1974 citing Motoyoshi Satake 1969). And around 1900 in Germany the honey itself was thought to be toxic to humans.
But fear not this little scene. Our insect is not a Bee collecting nectar for our honey. It's a Marmalade Hoverfly, Episyrphus balteatus, eating pollen. The proteins will be extracted from it by nectar and enzymes in Hoverfly's stomach. That will provide energy for reproduction and also for further foraging which is sure to pollinate plants for multiplication and the further Purple Glory of a garden.
One might wax eloquent on the migratory powers of our Hoverfly! It has been found flying over the Ocean more than 200 km from the coast. But even more interesting is a discovery made in 2015 in Spain by Antonio Robledo, head of research&development of Biobest Sistemas Biológicos. Researching pest control on paprika in greenhouses, he found that Eupeodes corollae is an excellent natural assistant to farmers. Its larvae feed on the aphids that terrorise those pepper plants. And besides the adult Hoverfly is an excellent pollinator for the flowers that will yield the peppery fruits. A dual purpose insect and eco-friendly, too. In 2019 Robledo's discovery began to be implemented on an industrial scale.
In the photo Eupeodes is not 'working' - perhaps on migratory holiday from Spain - but indulging on Oxalis articulata, Pink Sorrel, in the Amsterdam Hortus.
Many years ago I hiked the same route on the Peloponesse of Greece as Constantine Goulimis (1886-1963) a decade or so earlier, although I went from west to east, from Areopolis to Gytheio. Quite probably I saw this beautiful crocus near Vachos... but with too little knowledge I had no idea it was 'special'.
Our crocus was named for Dr Goulimis by William Bertram Turrill (1890-1961) in 1955. Here it is in full Autumn flower in the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam.
In the preface to his Fauna Boica, Franz von Paula Schrank (1747-1835), who first described our Sawfly (1802), writes, a bit exaltedly in the Jesuit style to which he was accustomed:
'Mein Naturforscher soll weniger Sammler als Beobachter, weniger Beschreiber als Philosoph seyn. Das war wenigstens immer die Methode, nach welche ich mich gewöhnet habe, die Natur zu studieren, und ich habe ihr viele glückliche Tage, und manche, ich möchte sagen, himmlische, Augenblicke zu verdanken'.
In paraphrase: Schrank describes himself not as a mere collector but as a student of Nature, not as a describer but as a Philosopher. That's his method and he says it afforded him many happy days and even heavenly moments.
I suppose that holds, too, for his examination of our Arge berberidis, a Black Heaven perhaps to him, and maybe to me as well. Schranke was a careful naturalist and watched this Arge carefully. With regret he notes that he saw it nestle in the ground (July 23, 1802) but didn't observe a live Sawfly emerging.
In his The Herball (1597) John Gerard (1545-1612) is one of the first to give an elaborate description of our Cyclamen. After a longish piece on the merits and uses of its various parts he becomes personally solicitous about the way he has planted his garden:
'It is not good for women with childe to touch or take this herbe, or to come neere unto it, or stride over the same where it groweth, for the naturall attractive vertue therein contained is such, that without controversie they that attempt it in manner abovesaid, shall be delivered before their time: which danger and inconvenience to avoide, I have (about the place where it groweth in my garden) fastened sticks in the ground, and some other stickes I have fastned also crosswaies over them, least any woman should by lamentable experiment finde my words to be true, by their stepping over the same'.
Already at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Thomas Johnson, 'Citizen and Apothecarye' of London, in his 1633 edition begged to differ with Gerard, writing that the latter had no proof for his assertion that Cyclamen is an abortifacient when women 'stride' over it: 'I iudge our Author too womanish in this, led more by vain opinion than by any reason or experience'.
For this time of the year in Amsterdam it's very cold, and it feels like Spring is too slow in bringing Warm Sun. Even these flowers this morning were very blue! But they waved prettily in the brisk wind...
When great Carolus Linnaeus described Doris Longwing in 1771 he refers to the painting engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet (1731-1790) in the magnificent Planches enluminées d'histoire naturelle edited by Edmé-Louis Daubenton (1730-1785) from 1765 onwards on the commission of that great French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). The book has more than a thousand plates of which 973 are of birds; the others picture insects and corals. Regrettably that volume does not specify who (of some 70 or more painters!) actually saw Doris whether mounted in Europe or alive in South America. And Daubenton does not give a Latin classificatory name - Linnaeus a bit later called it Papilio doris - but merely refers to it colorfully as 'Le Parasol de Surinam'.
The umbels of Alexanders are composed of numerous pretty, small green flowers with nice white-tipped stamens. They draw lots of foraging insects, notably Hoverflies, and Ants like to collect their sweets.
Here's a Garden Ant, Lasius niger, eating its fill.
For a minute I - your singing Frog, Rana Pipiens - hesitated. There it was on the west waterside of the Hortus, the hungry murderer of many kinfolk. But Grey Heron was turned away from the water searching the shrubbery for feathered fledglings. It prefers aquatic or semi-aquatic prey like Yours Truly, but I think 'pickings' were thin and Heron even ignored Fat Frog Me! With keen eyes it sought elsewhere. In any case, I was safe for now.
I plunged quietly and kicked my way to the pretty Bridge 232 - locked to the general public - leading to the so-called Overkas, the working greenhouse for the Hortus 'over the water' (on the right). That bridge was placed in 1877. Between 2016-2018 it was named for a Dutch hero against the Germans during WWII, Johan van Hulst, but that name was then given to nearby Bridge 233 (www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/51642724527/in/photoli...).
Compared to the glum summer's day in Amsterdam, the Greenhouse in our Hortus was bright and comforting.
Here's Achira, Canna indica. It hails from South America, and was attested by one of the conquistadores of Peru, Diego Palomino (ca.1506-?) in 1549. He'd seen it in the Cuquimayo Valley (Cusco) and describes it under the Quecha name Achira as one of four root crops of that area (the others are sweet potato, cassava, and racacha). Our plant was first scientifically described (1609) by the Jesuit father, Benabé Cobo (1582-1657). Soon botanists in Europe such as Bauhin, Parkinson, Clusius, and others were writing about it. Parkinson (1629) called it 'The Indian flowring Reede'. And given its colors, that's appropriate.
This is not the golden brightness most people associate with Tulipa clusiana, which is more a combination of white and pink or red. In 1923 our plant was found by a flower collecting expedition in the very north of India, the union state of Jammu and Kashmir. It was first called only Mountain Tulip and then regarded a hybrid or even a cultivar of Tulipa clusiana. Cell analysis made clear, however, that Chrysantha is a special, natural variety of Clusiana.
And a Golden Beauty at that! In his great description of Tulips of 1803 Pierre-Joseph Redouté writes of Clusiana: 'Cette plante mérite ... d'être cultivée dans les jardins d'ornement.' I would hazard the same is even more true of Chysantha!
It's often called 'alba' or white, is our Fuchsia magellanica, var. molinae Espinosa. In fact though, its 'petticoats' are of a very pretty pale pink.
This Fuchsia hails from the large island of Chiloé about 1000 kms south of Santiago de Chile. Marcial Ramón Espinosa Bustos (1874-1959) in 1929 named it to honor Juan Ignacio Molina (1740-1829), formidable polymath born in Chile. He entered the Jesuit order and on its supression in that country fled to Italy where he among other positions was professor of Greek in Bologna. He continued his work in natural history and was one of the precursors of the theory of the gradual evolution of species for which Charles Darwin is so famous. In fact, Darwin often refers to Molina in his works.
Espinosa writes on the centenary of Molina's death when he made his scientific description of our Fuchsia: 'Es para mà muy satisfactorio dedicir esta variedad, como un modesto homenaje, al eminente naturalista e historiador chileno, el abate don Juan Ignacio Molina'.
Someone has written that this snowdrop is a bit of a scraggly affair compared to the common, single kind. Nonetheless, I rather like it. Apparently it was already being grown in England in the Duchess of Beaufort's garden around 1700. Whether that was its first bedding I don't know but soon it could be found all over western Europe. And today it's a spring garden's favorite.
In the glum morning I was admiring Eucomis pole-evansii, the Great Pineapple Lily. The 'pole-evansii' is for Welshman Illtyd Buller Pole Evans (1879-1968), appointed to mycology and plant pathology at the Transvaal (South Africa) Department of Agriculture in 1918.
So there I was looking at those pallid fowers. A bit of sunlight and a few Bees were out collecting pollen.
As I watched I startled the Honeybee in the main photo. She lost her bearings and got caught up in a finely constructed spiderweb. In a blinking of my eyes she was already being tightly wrapped and readied for lunch by Spider. Amazingly quickly. About halfway on the right of her enwebbed body you can still make out some of that yellow pollen.
My mother of dear memory once told me that she was seasick for a week on the North Atlantic and that she - who had a great penchant for colors in her flower beds - saw various dark shades of lilac and purple most of the time in her delirium. She'd have been amused by the story of Elias Erici Tillandz for whom this wonderful excentric plant was named. Tillandz (1640-1693) from Finland, as a student traveled from Turku to Stockholm to further his studies. On the way there he is said to have been so dreadfully seasick that he never ventured aboard a ship again. To return home he walked the 1000 kms around the Bothnian Gulf.
Great Carolus Linnaeus, always in for a good story, decided to name a Bromeliad family for Tillandz because the roots of these plants are so shallow that they never need to experience deep water. Of course they live mostly in the jungle and collect water in a variety of other ways.
Olymp decided to be bright in the dimness of the Hortus glasshouse in the autumnal gales. So the photo is a bit more colorful than I'd have wanted. But Olymp doesn't easily take 'no' for an answer...
Together with Johan Huydecoper (1625-1704), a famous mayor of Amsterdam, Jan Commelin (1629-1692) founded the Hortus Botanicus at its present location in 1682. Commelin, the botanist of the two, wrote a catalogue of its plants, the first volume of which was printed in 1697.
In it he describes our African Milkwort as a year-round plant. He says it came to the garden from the Cape of Good Hope through the good offices of Huydecoper. Just as a drawing was being made of it, the plant met with accident. Commelin writes that it could still be drawn but that it died before he could examine its seeds. So the plant in the photo is not descended from Commelin's plant...
In other words I do not know the name of this flower I photographed at the Open Garden, "The Wright Place" in Kambah, Canberra, ACT. An overcast and very windy day so I was pleased to get this image without using a tripod. An amazing garden with a series of garden rooms avoiding straight lines where possible.
I now believe this flower is an Osteospermum.
This morning the beautifully blue Chicory flowers in the Hortus Botanicus were full of small Resin Bees, Heriades truncorum (I think). The word 'resin' refers to their use of resin for the cell walls of their nests. According to Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1897-1873) in his great Nomenclator 'Heriades' is derived from the ancient Greek for wool. Why 'wool' would be descriptive of our Bee, I don't know.
This pretty creature is particularly devoted to yellow aster-like flowers. And you can tell she's been on a visit there. Heriades doesn't gather pollen in corbiculae on her tibias; instead pollen clings to hairs on her abdomen. Here you can clearly see her bright yellow collection.
Chicory has white pollen and the Resin Bees I saw were not collecting it. Rather they were diving deep down into the heart of the flower, presumably for nectar. An after work drink?...
The name 'Sophora' comes from the Arabic and means something like a pea-flowering tree. And indeed our plant is a member of the pea-family. It hails from the west coast of South America, especially from Chile.
Already described by James Edward Smith (1759-1828) in 1798, it gained horticultural currency after the famous Loddiges Nurseries in England planted seed in 1822. It flowered in this vibrant yellow in 1826. Those seeds had been procured by Loddiges from James (Diego) Paroissien (1781-1827), scion of a Huguenot family which had settled in England. He went to South America as a physician, and 'assisted' in the wars of independence from the Spanish Empire by Argentina, Chile and Peru, rising to the rank of general.
In the Palm House of the Hortus, this Sophora lifts up the heart of anyone tired of Dutch Drab Weather at this time of the year!
"Painter's Sorrow" is in fact a translation of one of the Dutch names for this very pretty little flower: Schildersverdriet. Apparently painters thought it very hard to picture properly. I can sympathise: it's really hard to get a good focus on this flower. My DOF can get no where near an acceptable photo much as I have tried. Perhaps later some time...
I'd been watching this small Mining Bee for half an hour or so collecting and packing that bright orange pollen. Then she lit on a stem behind a flower head. Sat there for awhile, maybe contemplating how to get to the stamens. Without trying she then flew off to wherever her nest is. And I went home for my own protein!
Europe, Netherlands, Zuid Holland, Lieden, Rapenburg, Hortus Botanicus. Hothouse, Tropical plants
'De Hortus' is the oldest botanical garden of the Neherlands-- foudend in 1590 by Carolus Clusius. Website: here.
It's been a while since i posted Hortus pics, the last time was some 13 years ago: here, here and here.
German plant collector Johann Frantz Drège (1794-1881) (see my www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/34721393640/in/photoli...) found the forebears of this pretty Nemesia versicolor during the Summer of 1830 in three places in South Africa: notably in the west between Lange Vlei and Heerenlogement and in the east near Silver Fontein not far from the uMzinyathi River (Buffalo River) running down from the Drakensberg, part of South Africa's Great Escarpment relatively near Lesotho. In the scientific literature there's confusion about the exact coordinates of these places. Drège's extant herbarium exemplars (Missouri; both from Lange Vlei [see internet photos]) were identified by Adèle Lewis Grant (1881-1969) as Nemesia versicolor Benth. in 1930 but the coordinates ([28°34'22"S][023°49'34"E] are for a place west of Kimberley and neither for Lange Vlei nor for Silver Fontein.
Drège was an intrepid and exacting collector, and he noted down carefully where he found his plants. His notes were later edited by his friend Meyer in 1843 and our Nemesia was scientifically described in 1836 by George Bentham.
Drège returning to Germany in 1834 married and, remarkably, renounced his adventurous life. He became the director of a nursery business. These pretty flowers in the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam derive, I am pretty sure (the inset 'red' is, I think, not a 'naturally' occurring form), not from those South African climes but they're the cultivar products of a Dutch nursery. I'll have to ask my friends at the Hortus from which one.
Looking at a pretty cluster of Venus Flytraps in the fine bog for insectivorous plant of the Hortus, I noticed that a Wasp had been captured not very much earlier. In fact, the trap was still slowly closing on the already dead insect. A Flesh Fly alighted to see what it could see, and have a lick or two of terminal waspy body fluids. After a minute or so, it flew off to land right in the middle of another trap. It overstayed its welcome; generally those traps close within about twenty seconds of two or three of its trigger hairs having been touched. The drama unfolded before my eyes; relatively slowly the trap closed and Fly could no longer break loose... If you examine the inset you can see its red left eye looking through the 'bars'. As I left it was still struggling against digestion. An hour or so later all was still.
On a trellis of the wind-free wall of the Palm House of the Hortus in the early spring Sun this Blood Pear is about to burst into its pretty blossom. It hails from the mid-Apennines in Italy; the 'cocomerina' is for watermelon. Though the pear has greenish skin, its flesh is pink; hence its English name: 'Blood Pear'.
What's in a name?, one might well ask. Anyone visiting Butterfly Houses anywhere will likely encounter beautiful Zebra Heliconian or Zebra Longwing. Those who look at Latin names might be surprised: there's a prevalent spelling of 'Heliconius charitonia' which is quite wrong, missing out an 'h'. The 'official' name is: Heliconius charithonia. If you're interested, look at the learned taxonomical article by Andrew V.Z. Brower in the Journal of the Lepidopterists' Society , 1994. In two closely printed pages all the pros and cons of this name-giving are precisely and astutely treated. It's a good read, too!
In the photo are three of them savoring a Bidens, a Beggartick. Here again a matter of naming. The sign tells us that this is Bidens biternata (Lour.) Merr. & Sherff, and that it hails from China. If this is the case, it's the same plant that João de Loureiro (1717-1791) (cf: www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/25180121449/in/photoli...) described (1790) as Coreopsis biternata. But I don't think the Bidens in the photo is this one. Loureiro's plant has yellow asterlike flowers, and these are white. Perhaps the Hortus has seeded 'Biternata' here and these Longwings and I alit on white before they've flowered...
Yes, I did have an idea of Lake Victoria in Africa being locally called Nyanza. So that's what our African Acanthus was named for by the Brits around 1900 who explored and subjugated East Africa.
But the plant had already been found and described earlier in the west by the adventurous French botanist and naturalist Ambroise Marie François Joseph Palisot de Beauvois (1752-1820). In 1818 in the second volume of his interesting Flore d'Oware, he named it for his traveling buddy, one M. Brillant-Marion (on whom I could find nothing; 'M' may stand for a first name or else just for 'Monsieur', or his name may be 'Marion Brillant'). Palisot is proud to have been the first botanist to have traversed Oware, as he calls it.
But the 'owariensis' had me stumped.
Palisot, though, in his description adds that he found our flower near Agathon in what is today Nigeria. I searched around a bit more and found that Agathon goes by a variety of similar names. The one on a map of ca. 1700 (inset) is Agotton. That, too, is what Willem Bosman calls it in his Nauwkeurige beschryving of 1704. The town lies on a hill on an island in the Benin River. He adds some remarks about the fruitfulness of the area and how it's being rebuilt after recent war damage. And it turns out 'Oware' is also 'Ouwerre', today the petroleum city of Warri.
The history of that place belies the beauty of the Acanthus. It turns out this area was part of the Dutch Slaving Coast from where many non-human products were also procured. Agotton enriched the Dutch with fine cloth and with huge shipments of ivory. Now oil is what counts.
Exploitation east and west... then and now.
in 2019 Anthony Hitchcock (1960-2020) published a wonderfully exciting overview of the 're-establishment' of this Erica, discovered in the Cape, South Africa, in 1767 but extinct in the wild from 1908 (Science and Actions for Species Protection: Noah’s Arks for the 21st Century. Proceedings of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ Proceedings of the Workshop of 13-14 May 2019, Chapter 46, eds. Jurgen von Braun, Thomas Kauffels, Peter Raven, Johannes Vogel and Marchello Sánchez Sorondo, Libreria Editrice Vaticana). There's now a shrub of it in the entirely renovated Glass House of the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam.
The photo shows a Garden Bumblebee 'stealing' nectar from one of Heath's pretty tubular flowers. Its tongue isn't long enough to access that sweetness through the tube. So it gnaws a tiny hole at the base of the flower that allows it to suck up nectar. I've earlier posted a similar phenomenon but on Aquilegia: www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/47944011838/in/photoli.... Take a look at our Bee's proboscis.
Often photos of Cape Myrtle show the pretty, crepe flowers (e.g. my www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/32033583714/in/photoli...). But today's fine view of its Autumn Foliage in the Hortus Botanicus is worth a view! Enjoy.
Myself quite chilled, I came upon our Common Carder Bumblebee clinging to - perhaps pleonastically - Beautiful Calaminth - καλαμίνθα - on its footstool - κλινοπόδιον (but in the photo you can hardly see the hairy sepals from which the really very tiny flower arises).
Bombus was utterly wet and cold. Though she tried to move whirring her wings, nothing came of it. She just hadn't the energy to whir fast enough. For that nectar is needed or the Sun to provide enough warmth for her thorax to get a temperature of above ca. 30 C. So I took her in my cupped hand and breathed into them; slowly she revived and when a bit of Sun came out I put her back on Lesser Calaminth. She didn't stay long but slowly and a bit stiffly, I thought, bumbled away right into another rain shower. Coward for rainy wetness that I am, I gave up and fled into the Tropical Glasshouse for my own warmth.
In 1837 The Botanical Magazine writes that their pretty colored drawing of our Plant was made by William Henry Harvey (1811-1866). Harvey was an Irish botanist who worked in South Africa 1835-1837 and revisited there 1853-1858. He's the co-author of the first volumes of the important Flora Capensis (1859-1933). The drawing was made from a Tulbaghia flowering in 'the Ludwigsburg garden, at the Cape of Good Hope'. What that garden is called today and where it is, I don't know.
The same entry also says that the 'roots' derived from the Government Gardens (=Company Gardens, I think), where the plant had been presented from an unknown venue a few years previously to Lady Frances Cole (1784-1847). She was the wife of the rather unfortunate governor (1828-1833) of the Cape, Galbraith Lowry Cole (1772-1842). Presumably she'd received this Tulbaghia when he was still in office, so before 1833.
This photo was taken in the Hortus Botanicus of Amsterdam, a repository for plants from South Africa. The violet color is not as common in Tulbaghia as the usual yellow, and I didn't smell garlic... I've written elsewhere on great Linnaeus's derivation of the name
(www.flickr.com/photos/87453322@N00/35164401114/in/photoli...).
In the mornings the plants in the South-African Glasshouse of the Hortus are watered. Here's a very wet Heather. It was first described in 1785 by a student of Carl Peter Thunberg (1743-1828) in Stockholm, one musician called Jacobus Bernhardus Struve (1767-1826). Struve hailed from a pharmacist family but his heart was especially in music and he became an accomplished composer in particular of comic operas.
There are many heathers and they're extensively studied. As far as I know the last rediscription and naming of this plant is by Edward George Hudson (1938-2015) and Inge Magdalene Oliver, née Nitzsche (1947-2003) in 2005 as Erica unicolor subsp. mutica. One of its notable features are the generally three-flowered clusters. It's an endangered plant and the Hortus is happy to have one in its care!