Why the passionflower?

You may have noticed that on every page of the website and on the JustGiving page there is a passionflower drawing that has been written over.

I located this drawing on a page of Anderson's manuscripts and really liked it as an image. The writing was Anderson's but the image may well have been drawn by someone else - possibly John Tyley. I used it as a bookmark to pass out when people came to the pop-up exhibition when it was shown in the High Wycombe museum, and the Dundee Botanical Gardens in 2023; there are some in St Vincent too as I left a load there. And if you click on this link you can find out more about the flower and see a dried-and-pressed specimen of it that Anderson sent to London from St Vincent.

As you can see from the image below there is quite a lot of botanical information across the 3 drawings, with one still a sketch. With paper at a premium in the late 1700s, it is of no surprise that it was re-used; the writing you see is botanical Latin and part of the c.1800 plant catalogue often known as Anderson's Hortus.

I hope you like the passionflower image that is sort of a logo for the work around the colonial history of the St Vincent Botanical Garden, and do look at the link above to learn more about it (you can ignore the feedback part unless you'd like to of course ;o)