Alexander Anderson (1748-1811)
Alexander Anderson was born in Scotland in 1748. Little is known about his early life but from his own writings we know he had an older brother called John.
Nothing is known of Anderson’s school days, but he did attend the University of Edinburgh in 1770, although he did not matriculated his second year and did not gain a degree. Despite this, in January 1791, Anderson was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh as a surgeon and botanist, although there is no record of him ever gaining formal medical or surgical qualifications.
In 1771 Anderson was employed in London at the Apothecaries Garden at Chelsea (now Chelsea Physic Garden – herein Chelsea). Established in 1673 to teach apprentices studying the medicinal uses of plants, the Apothecaries Garden was a prestigious establishment. It was the second oldest botanic garden in Britain and was the garden where Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), the naturalist, collector, physician, and founder of the British Museum, trained.
At the Apothecaries Garden at Chelsea, Anderson worked under William Forsyth (1737-1804), a fellow Scot who was appointed its head gardener in 1771; in 1774 Forsyth created the first rock garden in Europe there. The Apothecaries Garden at Chelsea was therefore a highly prestigious place, and thus we can assume Anderson deliberately left his academic studies at Edinburgh to work more practically at this esteemed location in London. However, his lack of formal education did mean that in 1789, Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), the explorer botanist, and principle scientific advisor to King George III, wrote that Anderson was a man of ‘natural parts & activity’ and did not have ‘enough of scientific Education to be depended upon.’
However, it seems what Chelsea offered was not sufficient for Anderson as in December 1774, he set sail from London for New York where he stayed with his brother John, who had emigrated some years earlier and was working as a printer. John’s son, also named Alexander (1775-1870), went on to become a famous engraver and a “distinguished doctor”, and spent a couple of months with his uncle in the St Vincent Botanical Garden in the spring of 1798.
Anderson did not part on bad terms with Forsyth as the two men exchanged letters between 1775 and 1795. In 1779 Forsyth became the chief superintendent of the Royal Garden of St. James and Kensington, giving Anderson a high-status personal contact. In these letters Anderson tells Forsyth, he has collected hundreds of plant species that he is ‘entirely ignorant of,’ and wishes he had the works of the esteemed Swedish biologist and physician, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) because no one in New York and the surrounding areas knew ’anything of botany’.
Anderson’s collecting of local flora was disrupted in 1776 when his letters the ‘peace & quiet’ of his new home was disturbed by the ‘horror of a Civil War’; he writes how that drums, guns and bayonets are all around and that ‘all American from 16 years old to 60 is in Arms’. Anderson was a first-hand witness to the American War of Independence, but being British, his sympathies lay with his own side.
By 1778, Anderson is in Philadelphia, collecting plants and seeds, noting to Forsyth he is improving his Latin and learning French. He also had been observing ‘the virtue of small plants as ascertained by the Country people and Indians’, referring to their folk medicines and his own interests in ethnobotany. Late in that year though, the then-called Thirteen Colonies prove to be too difficult a place for him to stay and he returns to New York intent in heading to Surinam. However, enroute he was captured by an American privateer and as prisoner of war, billeted in Martinique where there he took ‘every opportunity to collect Fossils, Shells &c’; it seems that being taken captive did not deter his curiosity in the natural world.
By 1780 Anderson is in St Lucia where he complains of the ague and an intermittent fever stating that ‘the air of this island is mortal to most Europeans and very few constitutions can stand it’. He found the heat on St. Lucia, ‘oftentimes almost intolerable’, and the region ‘inhospitable’, which he noted made his observations of ‘Vegetable, Animal or Mineral’ difficult. However, despite this he asks Forsyth about how parasitical plants might be preserved so he could transport them to the hot-house in the Apothecaries Garden in Chelsea.
In St Lucia, Anderson located the plant he called quina or china. The plant was sent to London for testing and was eventually described and named as Cinchone santaeluciae, a relative of C. officinalis, the source of quinine’. Sadly although ‘it tasted as bitter as quinine, it did not contain the cinchona alkaloids’. Anderson believing the plant to be medicinal, had taken it to Dr George Young who was working at the St Lucia general hospital; Young was the first superintendent of the St. Vincent Botanical Garden, but had been exiled from St. Vincent when the French occupied the island in June 1779.
St. Vincent was returned to the British under the Treaty of Versailles in 1783 but when Young returned to the Garden in 1784, he found it badly deteriorated and given the scale of the restoration, Young suggested that the superintendentship be handed over to someone else, and he recommended Alexander Anderson.
In 1785 Anderson was appointed superintendent of the St. Vincent Botanical Garden and under his direction it became a global plant hub. He went on plant hunting trips around the region, bringing back species he thought would be useful additions to the garden, and sending dried-and-pressed specimens of plants to London for identification; he regularly recorded the plant species growing in the garden (and the image at the bottom of the page is taken from one of his manuscripts), and sometimes noted the uses of plants by enslaved Africans and the Island’s indigenous people. He also wrote natural histories of several Caribbean islands, and a history of the garden and of St Vincent. Anderson’s work in the St Vincent Botanical Garden was remarkable for many reasons, and this online exhibition provides some information on Anderson and the garden, those who worked there, and a selection of plants that had medicinal, economic, or ornamental use; it is this work that will underpin much of the content of th guidebook.
Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of Anderson was that rather than plant up the botanical garden as was usual for Europeans, he adopted the horticultural technique of using maximising tree cover to help plants thrive; he learnt this method by observing how the provision grounds of enslaved Africans were highly productive, whereas those of the Europeans were often barren.
In 1799 Alexander Anderson married Elizabeth Alexander, and this blog provides a little information about the relationship between Elizabeth and the enslaved African woman, Maria, that she claimed ownership over. Elizabeth and Alexander had one child, a daughter called Elizabeth and nicknamed Betsy, who was born almost a year to the day after their marriage.
Alexander Anderson died in 1811, and is buried in the churchyard of the Anglican Cathedral of St. George in Kingstown, St Vincent. His successor superintendents, William Lockhead, and then George Caley, removed many of the trees that Anderson had found crucial to the success of the garden, and by 1822, although the garden was still productive, the British government decided many of the plants and trees should be relocated to Trinidad where a new botanical garden was being established. A potted history of the garden and its curators access the 260 years the garden has existed can be found here.
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