William Graham McIvor (1824 or 1825 - 8 June 1876) was a Scottish gardener and superintendent of the Neilgherry Cinchona plantations in Ootacamund, India who was responsible for the successful introduction of cinchona plants in the Nilgiris in the 1860s.
McIvor was born in Dollar in Scotland where his father John had settled after working to establish a nursery garden at Crieff. McIvor trained in horticulture and arboriculture and worked at Kew before taking up in 1848, a position in southern India as superintendent of the yet to be established Ootacamund botanical garden. At Kew, McIvor took an interest in bryophytes and published a pocket herbarium of British hepatics in 1847. He established the botanical garden at Ootacamund and worked there until his death. He married Anne, eldest daughter of Colonel Edwards of Iscoed, Denbighshire on 31 May 1850. [1] [2] McIvor received cinchona plants in 1861 that had been brought from South America by Clements Markham. The first set of plants died but later batches consisting of other species (especially Cinchona succirubra ) did well. [3] McIvor found that removing strips of barks and allowing them to heal by covering them in moss improved the sustainability of harvesting bark from the trees. [4]
McIvor ran into troubles with the Madras Government on handling a subordinate who was given to drinking. He also faced labour shortages which were for a while solved by importing Chinese convicts from the Straits Settlements. The labour situation eased in 1877 due to the famine in the plains and an influx into the Niligiris. [5]
His funeral was attended by most government officers and among those present included Colonel R. H. Beddome. [2]
The standard author abbreviation McIvor is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name . [6]
Ooty, officially known as Udhagamandalam ; abbreviated as Udhagai), is a town and a municipality in the Nilgiris district of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is located 86 km (53 mi) north west of Coimbatore, 100 km north west of Tirupur, 128 km (80 mi) south of Mysore and is the headquarters of the Nilgiris district. It is a popular hill station located in the Nilgiri Hills. It is popularly called the "Queen of Hill Stations". It was the summer capital of the Madras Presidency.
Cinchona is a genus of flowering plants in the family Rubiaceae containing at least 23 species of trees and shrubs. All are native to the tropical Andean forests of western South America. A few species are reportedly naturalized in Central America, Jamaica, French Polynesia, Sulawesi, Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and São Tomé and Príncipe off the coast of tropical Africa, and others have been cultivated in India and Java, where they have formed hybrids.
The Nilgiris district is one of the 38 districts in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Nilgiri is the name given to a range of mountains spread across the borders among the states of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala. The Nilgiri Hills are part of a larger mountain chain known as the Western Ghats. Their highest point is the mountain of Doddabetta, height 2,637 m. The district is contained mainly within the Nilgiri Mountains range. The administrative headquarters is located at Ooty. The district is bounded by Coimbatore to the south, Erode to the east, and Chamarajnagar district of Karnataka and Wayanad district of Kerala to the north. As it is located at the junction of three states, namely, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka, significant Malayali and Kannadiga populations reside in the district. Nilgiris district is known for natural mines of Gold, which is also seen in the other parts of Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve extended in the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Kerala too.
Lalbagh Botanical Garden or simply Lalbagh, is an botanical garden in Bangalore, India, with an over 200-year history. First planned and laid out during the dalavaiship of Hyder Ali, the garden was later managed under numerous British Superintendents before Indian Independence. It was responsible for the introduction and propagation of numerous ornamental plants as well as those of economic value. It also served a social function as a park and recreational space, with a central glass house dating from 1890 which was used for flower shows. In modern times, it hosts two flower shows coinciding with the week of Republic Day and Independence Day. As an urban green space along with Cubbon Park, it is also home to numerous wild species of birds and other wildlife. The garden also has a lake adjoining a large rock on which a watchtower had been constructed during the reign of Kempegowda II.
Sir George King was a British botanist who was appointed superintendent of the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta in 1871, and became the first Director of the Botanical Survey of India from 1890. He was recognised for his work in the cultivation of cinchona and for setting up a system for the inexpensive distribution of quinine throughout India through the postal system.
The Government Botanical Garden is a botanical garden in Udhagamandalam, near Coimbatore (Ooty), Tamil Nadu state, India laid out in 1848. The gardens, divided into several sections, cover an area of around 55 acres, and lie on the lower slopes of Doddabetta peak. The garden has a terraced layout. It is maintained by the Tamil Nadu Horticulture Department.
John Forbes Royle, British botanist and teacher of materia medica, was born in Kanpur in 1798. He was in charge of the botanical garden at Saharanpur and played a role in the development of economic botany in India.
The Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, previously known as Indian Botanic Garden and the Calcutta Botanic Garden, is a botanical garden situated in Shibpur, Howrah near Kolkata. They are commonly known as the Calcutta Botanical Garden and previously as the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta. The gardens exhibit a wide variety of rare plants and a total collection of over 12,000 specimens spread over 109 hectares. It is under Botanical Survey of India (BSI) of Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India.
Robert Wight MD FRS FLS was a Scottish surgeon in the East India Company, whose professional career was spent entirely in southern India, where his greatest achievements were in botany – as an economic botanist and leading taxonomist in south India. He contributed to the introduction of American cotton. As a taxonomist he described 110 new genera and 1267 new species of flowering plants. He employed Indian botanical artists to illustrate many plants collected by himself and Indian collectors he trained. Some of these illustrations were published by William Hooker in Britain, but from 1838 he published a series of illustrated works in Madras including the uncoloured, six-volume Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis (1838–53) and two hand-coloured, two-volume works, the Illustrations of Indian Botany (1838–50) and Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1845–51). By the time he retired from India in 1853 he had published 2464 illustrations of Indian plants. The standard author abbreviation Wight is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Archibald Campbell of the Bengal Medical Service was the first superintendent (1840-1862) of the sanatorium town of Darjeeling in north east India. He also took a great interest in ethnology, economic botany and the study of the region and wrote extensively in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal under the name of "Dr Campbell" or "Dr A. Campbell" which has led some authors to misidentify his first name as Arthur or even Andrew. Campbell is credited with the introduction of tea cultivation in Darjeeling and for playing a role in the early experiments on the cultivation of Cinchona. Campbell corresponded with numerous naturalists including B.H. Hodgson and Sir Joseph Hooker. The latter travelled around Sikkim with Campbell on an expedition in which the two were held prisoner by Tsugphud Namgyal, the local ruler. This incident led to the British annexation of the Sikkim Terai region.
Sispara, സിസ്പാര, a proper noun, is a combination of the Badaga language words si:su + pore; meaning: magnetite bearing rock + gorge. It may refer to:
James Sykes Gamble was an English botanist who specialized in the flora of the Indian sub-continent; he became Director of the British Imperial Forest School at Dehradun, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Philip Furley Fyson (1877–1947) was a botanist and educator who worked in India. He is noted as the author of the first illustrated volumes on the flora of the South Indian hills. The Fyson prize is instituted in his honour by the Presidency College, Chennai for work in the area of Natural science.
Andrew Thomas Gage was a Scottish botanist and surgeon in the Indian Medical Service who worked at the Calcutta Botanical Garden.
Charles Henry Wood was a British chemist. He was employed in the study of quinine extraction in British India, where he was a Professor of Chemistry at the Medical College, Calcutta.
Marmaduke Alexander Lawson was a British botanist.
James Alexander Gammie was a Kew-trained Scottish gardener and botanist known for his work in raising cinchona plantations in Mungpoo in northeastern India and in introducing a process for the extraction of cinchona alkaloids at the factory in Rungbee.
Mangpoo is a village in the Kurseong Vidhan Sabha Rongli Development Block in the Darjeeling Sadar Subdivision of the Darjeeling district in the state of West Bengal, India.
Ludwig Bernhard Ehregott Schmid was a German Lutheran clergyman and missionary who worked in India. Ill health led him to choose to live in Ootacamund and he spent considerable time examining local plants, and making collections of specimens, many of which were deposited in Jena where his cousin J. C. Zenker published a few descriptions but died too early to produce a more complete work. Several plant species have been named after Schmid including the fossil trees Peuce schmidiana and Mesembrioxylon schmidianum from Thiruvakkarai near Pondicherry.
Manuel Incra Mamani was a Bolivian Incan cascarillero who found a cinchona tree that had a higher proportion of quinine than most others. It went into commercial cultivation, providing most of the world's quinine.
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