Aburi Botanical Gardens | |
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![]() Walkway in Aburi Botanical Gardens | |
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Type | Botanical Garden |
Location | Aburi, Eastern Region |
Coordinates | 5°51′13″N0°10′33″W / 5.85361°N 0.17583°W |
Area | 64.8 hectares |
Created | March 1890 |
Aburi Botanical Gardens is a garden in Aburi in the Eastern Region of Ghana.
Today, in the 21st century, one cannot talk about horticulture in Ghana and West Africa without talking about the Aburi Botanical Gardens. The Garden occupies an area of 64.8 hectares. [1] It was opened in March 1890 and was founded by Governor William Brandford-Griffith and Dr. John Farrell Easmon, a Sierra Leonean medical doctor. [2] Before the garden was established, it was the site of a sanatorium built in 1875 for Gold Coast government officials. During the governorship of William Brandford-Griffith, a Basel missionary and Jamaican Moravian, Alexander Worthy Clerk, supervised the clearing of land around the sanatorium to start the Botanic Department. [3] In 1890 William Crowther, a student from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, was appointed the garden's first curator. [4] The gardens played an important role in encouraging cocoa production in South Ghana, by supplying cheap cocoa seedlings and information about scientific farming methods. [5] After Hevea brasiliensis was sent to Aburi from Kew in 1893, the gardens also encouraged rubber production in Ghana. [6]
In May 2019, the chief of Aburi, Otoobour Djan Kwasi II, called for the privatization of the Aburi Botanical Gardens. He was of the view that it was going to be an opportunity to invite investment to the tourist facility. He said the private investment could revitalize the Gardens and enhance its tourism potential to improve business in the area.
Aburi Botanic Garden has had many roles over the years including plant introduction and teaching scientific methods of agriculture but today is one of the many institutions leading the fight to save plant diversity through research, growing endangered plants, plant multiplication, horticultural training, and environmental education. [7]
One can find in the garden tree species such as silk cotton (ceiba pentandra), mahogany, cedar, silver oak, and many more.
In view of its geographical position on the mountain with various tropical tree species and botanical gardens, the town, especially the gardens known as the Aburi Botanical Gardens, has become a haven for both foreign and local tourists. [8]
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Henry Nicholas Ridley CMG (1911), MA (Oxon), FRS, FLS, F.R.H.S. was an English botanist, geologist and naturalist who lived much of his life in Singapore. He was instrumental in promoting rubber trees in the Malay Peninsula that led to a level of rapid deforestation, instrumental in the 1926 Great Flood. For the fervour with which he pursued this work he came to be known as "Mad Ridley".
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Aburi is a town in the Akuapim South Municipal District of the Eastern Region of south Ghana famous for the Aburi Botanical Gardens and the Odwira festival. Aburi has a population of 18,701 people as of 2013.
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Frederick William Thomas Burbidge (1847–1905) was a British explorer who collected many rare tropical plants for the famous Veitch Nurseries.
William Thomas Stearn was a British botanist. Born in Cambridge in 1911, he was largely self-educated and developed an early interest in books and natural history. His initial work experience was at a Cambridge bookshop, but he also had an occupation as an assistant in the university botany department. At the age of 29, he married Eldwyth Ruth Alford, who later became his collaborator.
Tetteh Quarshie was a agriculturalist in the British Colony of Gold Coast and the person directly responsible for the introduction of cocoa crops to Gold Coast, which today constitute one of the major export crops of the Ghanaian economy, the country Gold Coast became in 1957. Quarshie travelled to the island of Fernando Po in 1870 and returned in 1876 to Ghana in order to introduce the crop. He died on Christmas Day 1892.
Kew Gardens is a botanic garden in southwest London that houses the "largest and most diverse botanical and mycological collections in the world". Founded in 1840, from the exotic garden at Kew Park, its living collections include some of the 27,000 taxa curated by Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, while the herbarium, one of the largest in the world, has over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens. The library contains more than 750,000 volumes, and the illustrations collection contains more than 175,000 prints and drawings of plants. It is one of London's top tourist attractions and is a World Heritage Site.
Ulmus × hollandica 'Wentworthii Pendula', commonly known as the Wentworth Elm or Wentworth Weeping Elm, is a cultivar with a distinctive weeping habit that appears to have been introduced to cultivation towards the end of the 19th century. The tree is not mentioned in either Elwes and Henry's or Bean's classic works on British trees. The earliest known references are Dutch and German, the first by de Vos in Handboek tot de praktische kennis der voornaamste boomen (1890). At about the same time, the tree was offered for sale by the Späth nursery of Berlin as Ulmus Wentworthi pendulaHort.. The 'Hort.' in Späth's 1890 catalogue, without his customary label "new", confirms that the tree was by then in nurseries as a horticultural elm. De Vos, writing in 1889, states that the Supplement to Volume 1 includes entries announced since the main volume in 1887, putting the date of introduction between 1887 and 1889.
Thonningia is a monotypic genus of flowering plants in the family Balanophoraceae containing the single species Thonningia sanguinea. It is distributed throughout much of southern and western Africa, particularly the tropical regions. Common names for the plant include ground pineapple. A familiar plant to humans, it has an extremely long list of common names in many African languages. Many names are inspired by the resemblance of the plant's inflorescence to a pineapple or palm tree. Some of the names can be translated as pineapple of the bush, duiker's kolanut, and crown of the ground.
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