Kew the Royal Garden Charted by the working people

The Royal Botanic Gardens

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, grew from the botanic garden established by Princess Augusta in 1759 around the White House, and as the RBGK was enlarged and developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so the physical evidence of Brown’s work at Richmond Gardens has been overlaid and largely forgotten; except at the west end of the Syon Vista, where Brown’s vision of a pastoral landscape with a river running through suddenly and miraculously comes into view, the Thames has been largely planted out of the scene. The Hollow Walk, however, is still identifiable, albeit now planted with rhododendrons and other acid-loving shrubs and trees and sheltering in a bamboo grove the Minka House, a reconstructed traditional Japanese farmhouse. At the north (White Peaks) end of the Rhododendron Dell, a couple of veteran sweet chestnuts predating the excavation give a clue to the early eighteenth-century ground level, and half-way up the slope a noble London Plane survives from Brown’s planting of the late 1760s, as does an enormous cedar of Lebanon.

A wire fence and a dry ha-ha dug in 1851 now separate the modern Kew Gardens from the Old Deer Park, which in 1848 saw the construction of the railway and in 1933 the much more intrusive Great Chertsey Road and Twickenham Bridge. The King’s Observatory (now a private house with a new lake and landscape designed by Kim Wilkie) is currently wholly hidden from view by the trees that have grown up along the generally nonhistorical boundaries dividing the golf course from the rugby and other sports pitches. Some open parkland with stands of established trees does, however, survive, although much compromised.

Perhaps the last word on Brown at Richmond Gardens should be left to JJ Boydell in 1796:

‘Brown broke the avenues, rooted up the long line of dressed hedges, gave the woods a natural shape; unveiled extensive lawns; destroyed… Merlin and his cave, dilapidated every tasteless building; formed plantations, which are now grown into effect and beauty; and, conducting a gravel path around the whole, gradually displayed the varying scenery of this charming domain.’

1759: Princess Augusta, mother of King George III, founds a nine-acre botanic garden within the pleasure grounds at Kew.
1762: William Chambers builds the Great Pagoda.
1768: Joseph Banks sends seeds to Kew whilst on Captain Cook's voyage to South Seas, and becomes Kew's first unofficial director on his return.
1772: Francis Masson, Kew's first plant collector, goes to South Africa and returns with thousands of plants.
1773: Capability Brown creates the Hollow Walk, now the Rhododendron Dell.
1788: HMS Bounty goes to Tahiti with two Kew gardeners and collects 1,000 breadfruit plants. En route to Jamaica, the crew mutinies.
1802: King George III unites the Richmond and Kew estates.
1840: Kew transferred from the Crown to the government. Sir William Hooker is appointed director. The Gardens are opened to the public.
1841: Joseph Hooker brings plants from Falklands to Kew in glazed Wardian cases, a new way to keep plants alive on voyages.
1848: The Palm House is completed.
1853: The Herbarium is built. Today, after five extensions, it holds over seven million species.
1863: The Temperate House opens.
1865: On the death of his father, Joseph Dalton Hooker succeeds as director to Kew.
1876: Jodrell Laboratory is built. Work begins on plant pathology, and later on cells that produce latex.
1882: The Marianne North Gallery opens.
1889:Titan arum (corpse flower) blooms at Kew, the first time outside its native Sumatra.
1896: Women are first employed as gardeners at Kew.
1899: Temperate House is completed.
1911: Japanese Gateway 'Chokushi-Mon' is presented to Kew.
1913: Suffragettes attack glasshouse and burn down Kew's tea pavilion. Two are jailed.
1930: Imperial Bureau of Mycology move to site by Herbarium
1939: Dig for Victory! Vegetables and medicinal plants are grown at Kew to support the war effort.
1952: Crick and Watson discover structure of DNA; a breakthrough that underpins Kew's current scientific research on genetic diversity of plants.
Brown ‘vandal rather than visionary at Kew’
John Rocque’s An Exact Plan of the Royal Palace Gardens and Park at Richmond… is undated; [Fig.3] but the date of 1754 traditionally attributed to it appears too early, since it shows, on the Middlesex bank of the Thames, Brown’s lake, serpentine paths and clumps and specimen trees at Syon, works and plantings that Susan Darling’s researches indicate were undertaken between 1754 and 1757. The plan demonstrates clearly the contrast between the up-to-the-minute informal landscaping of the Northumberland estate and the relatively stiff transitional style of the royal estate, which still contained strong formal geometrical elements, as in Bridgeman’s canal and the axial avenues aligned on Richmond Lodge. Within the formal framework, however, were incorporated small arable fields and meadows for grazing, and blocks of woodland with both straight and meandering paths. The plan also shows vignettes of the classical Dairy, the thatched Merlin’s Cave, and the rustic Cyclopean Hermitage, and it was the destruction by Brown in the 1760s of most of these and other follies built by Kent for Queen Caroline only thirty or so years earlier that has earned Brown the reputation of vandal rather than visionary at Kew.
Queen Caroline, patroness of Bridgeman and Kent at Kensington Gardens and Richmond Gardens, is a major figure in the story of the development of the English landscape garden. Ray Desmond, in his comprehensive and authoritative The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew 1995, 2nd ed. 2007, quotes some of the contemporary criticism:
‘Richmond Gardens now declare the hand that spoilt them; nor is there a person who can recollect the beauty of the lengthened terrace, but censure the innovator – Mr Capability Brown… When I reflected that he had destroyed the Terrace that Queen Carolina [sic] made at great expence, and pulled down Merlin’s Cave, overturned her Hermitage, filled up her pond, removed her dairy, and drove the plough through her paddock, I own I grieved…’ (Middlesex Journal, 17 July 1773).
It is difficult now to judge the success and the extent of Brown’s work for George III: the scheme was never fully implemented, and the subsequent changes and overlays of the last 250 years have confused the picture; but the map evidence survives in the form of Brown’s plan for re-landscaping Richmond Gardens dated 10 December 1764 [Fig.2] and in the Plan of the Royal Manor of Richmond by Thomas Richardson, 1771. [Fig.4]

Inerta Newt lawed up a few layers of

Optics

Replica of Newton's second reflecting telescope, which he presented to the Royal Society in 1672^[49]

In 1666, Newton observed that the spectrum of colours exiting a prism in the position of minimum deviation is oblong, even when the light ray entering the prism is circular, which is to say, the prism refracts different colours by different angles.^[50]^[51] This led him to conclude that colour is a property intrinsic to light – a point which had, until then, been a matter of debate.

From 1670 to 1672, Newton lectured on optics.^[52] During this period he investigated the refraction of light, demonstrating that the multicoloured image produced by a prism, which he named a spectrum, could be recomposed into white light by a lens and a second prism.^[53] Modern scholarship has revealed that Newton's analysis and resynthesis of white light owes a debt to corpuscular alchemy.^[54]

He showed that coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects, and that regardless of whether reflected, scattered, or transmitted, the light remains the same colour. Thus, he observed that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves. This is known as Newton's theory of colour.^[55]

Illustration of a dispersive prism separating white light into the colours of the spectrum, as discovered by Newton

From this work, he concluded that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours (chromatic aberration). As a proof of the concept, he constructed a telescope using reflective mirrors instead of lenses as the objective to bypass that problem.^[56]^[57] Building the design, the first known functional reflecting telescope, today known as a Newtonian telescope,^[57] involved solving the problem of a suitable mirror material and shaping technique. Newton ground his own mirrors out of a custom composition of highly reflective speculum metal, using Newton's rings to judge the quality of the optics for his telescopes. In late 1668,^[58] he was able to produce this first reflecting telescope. It was about eight inches long and it gave a clearer and larger image. In 1671, the Royal Society asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope.^[59] Their interest encouraged him to publish his notes, Of Colours,^[60] which he later expanded into the work Opticks. When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. Newton and Hooke had brief exchanges in 1679–80, when Hooke, appointed to manage the Royal Society's correspondence, opened up a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions,^[61] which had the effect of stimulating Newton to work out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector. But the two men remained generally on poor terms until Hooke's death.^[62]

Facsimile of a 1682 letter from Isaac Newton to Dr William Briggs, commenting on Briggs' A New Theory of Vision.

Newton argued that light is composed of particles or corpuscles, which were refracted by accelerating into a denser medium. He verged on soundlike waves to explain the repeated pattern of reflection and transmission by thin films (Opticks Bk.II, Props. 12), but still retained his theory of 'fits' that disposed corpuscles to be reflected or transmitted (Props.13). However, later physicists favoured a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for the interference patterns and the general phenomenon of diffraction. Today's quantum mechanics, photons, and the idea of wave–particle duality bear only a minor resemblance to Newton's understanding of light.

In his Hypothesis of Light of 1675, Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles. The contact with the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Henry More revived his interest in alchemy.^[63] He replaced the ether with occult forces based on Hermetic ideas of attraction and repulsion between particles. John Maynard Keynes, who acquired many of Newton's writings on alchemy, stated that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason: He was the last of the magicians."^[64] Newton's interest in alchemy cannot be isolated from his contributions to science.^[63] This was at a time when there was no clear distinction between alchemy and science. Had he not relied on the occult idea of action at a distance, across a vacuum, he might not have developed his theory of gravity.

In 1704, Newton published Opticks, in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light. He considered light to be made up of extremely subtle corpuscles, that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, ... and may not Bodies receive much of their Activity from the Particles of Light which enter their Composition?"^[65] Newton also constructed a primitive form of a frictional electrostatic generator, using a glass globe.^[66]

In his book Opticks, Newton was the first to show a diagram using a prism as a beam expander, and also the use of multiple-prism arrays.^[67] Some 278 years after Newton's discussion, multiple-prism beam expanders became central to the development of narrow-linewidth tunable lasers. Also, the use of these prismatic beam expanders led to the multiple-prism dispersion theory.^[67]

Subsequent to Newton, much has been amended. Young and Fresnel discarded Newton's particle theory in favour of Huygens' wave theory to show that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength. Science also slowly came to realise the difference between perception of colour and mathematisable optics. The German poet and scientist, Goethe, could not shake the Newtonian foundation but "one hole Goethe did find in Newton's armour, ... Newton had committed himself to the doctrine that refraction without colour was impossible. He, therefore, thought that the object-glasses of telescopes must forever remain imperfect, achromatism and refraction being incompatible. This inference was proved by Dollond to be wrong."^[68]Corpuscularianism (from the Latin corpusculum meaning "little body") is a set of theories that explain natural transformations as a result of the interaction of particles (minima naturalia, partes exiles, partes parvae, particulae, and semina).^[1] It differs from atomism in that corpuscles are usually endowed with a property of their own and are further divisible, while atoms are neither. Although often associated with the emergence of early modern mechanical philosophy, and especially with the names of Thomas Hobbes,^[2] René Descartes,^[3] Pierre Gassendi,^[4] Robert Boyle,^[4] Isaac Newton,^[5] and John Locke,^[4] corpuscularian theories can be found throughout the history of Western philosophy.

Overview[edit]

Corpuscularianism is similar to the theory of atomism, except that where atoms were supposed to be indivisible, corpuscles could in principle be divided. In this manner, for example, it was theorized that mercury could penetrate into metals and modify their inner structure, a step on the way towards the production of gold by transmutation. Corpuscularianism was associated by its leading proponents with the idea that some of the apparent properties of objects are artifacts of the perceiving mind, that is, "secondary" qualities as distinguished from "primary" qualities.^[6] Corpuscularianism remained a dominant theory for centuries and was blended with alchemy by early scientists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton in the 17th century.

In his work The Sceptical Chymist (1661), Boyle abandoned the Aristotelian ideas of the classical elements—earth, water, air, and fire—in favor of corpuscularianism. In his later work, The Origin of Forms and Qualities (1666), Boyle used corpuscularianism to explain all of the major Aristotelian concepts, marking a departure from traditional Aristotelianism.^[7]

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes used corpuscularianism to justify his political theories in Leviathan.^[2] It was used by Newton in his development of the corpuscular theory of light,^[5] while Boyle used it to develop his mechanical corpuscular philosophy, which laid the foundations for the Chemical Revolution.^[8]

Alchemical corpuscularianism[edit]

William R. Newman traces the origins from the fourth book of Aristotle, Meteorology.^[9] The "dry" and "moist" exhalations of Aristotle became the alchemical 'sulfur' and 'mercury' of the eighth-century Islamic alchemist, Jābir ibn Hayyān (died c. 806–816). Pseudo-Geber's Summa perfectionis contains an alchemical theory in which unified sulfur and mercury corpuscles, differing in purity, size, and relative proportions, form the basis of a much more complicated process.^[10]^[11]

Importance to the development of modern scientific theory[edit]

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Several of the principles which corpuscularianism proposed became tenets of modern chemistry.

The idea that compounds can have secondary properties that differ from the properties of the elements which are combined to make them became the basis of molecular chemistry.
The idea that the same elements can be predictably combined in different ratios using different methods to create compounds with radically different properties became the basis of stoichiometry, crystalography, and established studies of chemical synthesis.
The ability of chemical processes to alter the composition of an object without significantly altering its form is the basis of fossil theory via mineralization and the understanding of numerous metallurgical, biological, and geological processes.

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