pansy: two colonies on Tresco and also some plants on newly dug fields on St Martin’s (Fig. 22). John Raven wrote a number of books and papers on plants, including Mountain Flowers in the New Naturalist series.
Besides acknowledging the many botanists who had contributed the records that formed the basis of his Flora, Lousley also refers to the first attempt to classify the common plant communities in Scilly by Oleg Polunin in 1953. At that time Polunin was the much-respected biology teacher at Charterhouse School, Godalming. He produced short descriptions of the plant communities in Some Plant Communities of the Scilly Isles (1953) as a handout for the boys he took on field trips to Scilly. Later in the 1950s he was Botanical Society of the British Isles (BSBI) recorder for West Cornwall, when he also found time to visit Scilly.
Polunin is probably now better known as the author of a number of photograph-based field guides to European plants.
Not everyone who recorded plants in Scilly was a botanist. W. S. Bristowe was an arachnologist who visited Scilly twice and wrote two seminal papers on the spiders (Bristowe, 1929, 1935). What is particularly remarkable is that he managed to land on so many of the small islets during his visit and not only collect spiders but also record the vegetation. In some cases until recently his were virtually the only records we have for some of the least accessible islands. Apparently he had a period of unprecedented calm weather for his stay that allowed him to make so many landings.
Someone else who seemed to manage to get onto many of the small rocky islands was a local photographer and keen naturalist. C. J. King lived on St Mary’s and owned a photographic business, sold postcards and gave lectures on natural history. He published an account of the birds and other wildlife as Some Notes on Wild Nature in Scillonia (1924). This is a small volume but full of his own very personal and interesting observations. He seems to have made many expeditions to uninhabited islands and scrambled among rocks to get close to the birds or seals he wanted to photograph, even spending the night there on occasion.
The association of the Dorrien-Smith family with Scilly, especially Tresco, has been of considerable significance to the natural history of the islands ever since Augustus Smith first leased the islands from the Duchy in 1834. During his stewardship Augustus Smith was responsible for many introductions, besides plants. Some of these introductions were quite eccentric: different coloured rabbits, deer, and even ‘ostriches’ – although from the photographs in Cowan (2001) and Llewellyn (2005) and the probable source of the birds (Augustus Smith apparently having ‘kidnapped’ the first one from a ship that had come from Rio) it would seem these were in fact South American rheas Rhea americana.
Augustus Smith also had an interest in birds, and many shot on the islands ended up in the Abbey collection. He also regularly had shooting parties, especially on Tresco, that sometimes resulted in flushing unusual species – which were shot. After the death of Augustus Smith, his nephew, Mr Thomas Algernon Smith-Dorrien (who in keeping with his uncle’s wishes changed his name to Smith-Dorrien-Smith, later shortened to Dorrien-Smith), took a leading interest in the new flower-growing industry (Vyvyan, 1953). The Dorrien-Smith family inherited the lease of all the islands, but when Major Arthur A. Dorrien-Smith (‘the Major’) succeeded his father Thomas Algernon he returned the lease to the Duchy, retaining only Tresco and the uninhabited isles. Although the Dorrien-Smiths have been mainly interested in plant acquisition for the Gardens, they also continued to add to their large collection of stuffed birds, mostly taken in the islands (generally only one of each species was collected). Between 1922 and 1940 the Misses Dorrien-Smith (Gwen and her niece Ann) made a collection of Scilly wild flowers. What Lousley describes as an ‘unreliable’ list of these, without localities, appears in Vyvyan (1953). But I think Lousley was a little harsh, as most of the 260 species are plants that are still on the Scilly list.
The Major took a particular interest in natural history, especially birds. He contributed regularly to British Birds and the reports of the Cornwall Birdwatching and Preservation Society. Commander Thomas Dorrien-Smith, the only son of the Major to survive World War II, was the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) honorary warden until the 1960s and also held a unique licence under the 1954 Protection of Birds Act from NCC to take bird specimens to add to the family’s private Abbey collection. ‘The Commander’, as he was known, was very disappointed when he was not told about the 1958 northern waterthrush Seiurus noveboracensis (the first for Britain), as he would have liked to add it to the collection! He was persuaded that rare birds should be left alive for others to enjoy and this was apparently why he stopped collecting (J. Parslow, in litt.). The last specimen shot for the Abbey collection was taken by Fred Wardle, the estate gamekeeper, about 1956. Later Peter MacKenzie persuaded the Commander to allow the bird collection to be moved from the Abbey to the basement of the recently opened museum on St Mary’s. While the collection was in the Abbey it was housed in a dark corridor; unfortunately when moved to the museum the specimens were exposed to strong light, eventually resulting in loss of colour and some deterioration. The Commander leased Tresco from 1955 until his death in 1973; his son Robert Dorrien-Smith succeeded him. Over the years the Abbey Gardens have been the source of most of the alien plants and animals now established in Scilly.
Collecting bird specimens as mounted skins was a perfectly respectable hobby among gentlemen in the nineteenth century. One collector, Edward Hearle Rodd, was author of The Birds of Cornwall and The Scilly Isles (1880), although he died while the book was in production and the final editing had to be carried out by his friend James Edmund Harting. Although there are references to Scilly throughout the text, the main section on Scilly consists of the collected letters from his nephew Francis Rashleigh Rodd, written to his uncle when staying on Tresco between 1864 and 1871. Rodd was a well-known collector of bird skins, and many specimens from Scilly ended up in his collection, eventually passing to his nephew on his death. F. R. Rodd was also a sportsman and collector, and shot many birds both for the pot and to add to his collection of stuffed birds. He also had dead birds sent to him from Scilly. One of his trophies that clearly delighted him was a bittern Botaurus stellaris that he ‘knocked down’ on Christmas Day 1864. He decided to have it mounted with the neck feathers ‘rampant’ rather than ‘couchant’. One interesting letter comments on how the gentlemen of the county were giving up their hobby of falconry and were now shooting birds instead. Collections of birds’ eggs and stuffed birds became very popular at the time. When his uncle died Rodd inherited his bird collection and housed it at Trebartha Hall in Cornwall with his own specimens. Everything was lost when the Hall was burned down in 1949 (Penhallurick, 1978).
Leslie and Clare Harvey moved to Scilly soon after Leslie retired as Professor of Zoology at Exeter University. Clare Harvey had also been a lecturer at the university and had specialised for many years in the study of seaweeds. They lived in a bungalow on the Garrison that was approached through a sally port (one of the stairways through the granite walls connecting one level with another). Ducking your head to descend the precipitous stairs to the garden, you were aware of all manner of plants, wild and cultivated, that ran riot on the walls and in the narrow garden. Clare was a great collector, and it is perhaps fortunate for future botanists that the high walls of the Garrison imprisoned most of the plants within the garden. During their sojourn on the islands the Harveys were the focus of all that was botanical, and in 1970 they started a wild-flower table in the museum, exhibiting live specimens during the summer months, replenished weekly by a group of local enthusiasts known affectionately as the museum ‘Flower Ladies’. Clare was BSBI recorder for Scilly until the 1980s, but sadly, despite an unrivalled knowledge of the wild flowers, she kept no records, wrote very little and rather lost heart without Leslie’s company after he died in 1986. Despite increasing frailty and failing sight, Clare still took an interest in the plants and continued to write to me and send specimens until just before her death in 1996 when she was in her nineties. The ‘Flower Ladies’ continued to put out their weekly display of local wild flowers until 2004, when the last team retired. But Julia Ottery (who produced a book of her wild-flower paintings in 1966), Celia Sisam, Elizabeth Legg, Lesley Knight and others were responsible for adding many plant records to the flora. Another resident who contributed to what we know about the flora was Peter Clough, who was head gardener at Tresco Abbey from 1973 until 1984. Besides being a notable horticulturalist, Peter was also a keen