Sir Joseph Banks and his Florilegium

The link between Lieutenant (‘Captain’) James Cook and the gumnut babies may not be obvious at first, but had it not been for Cook’s 1770 visit to eastern Australia, May Gibbs’ classic would have been rather different.

Tales of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, first published in 1918, is the most famous book by English-born Australian illustrator and author Gibbs, who died in 1969. It is the first of her much-loved series featuring characters based on Australian plants, with the gumnut babies Snugglepot and Cuddlepie inspired by Eucalyptus species. The fruiting heads of the Banksia species became the “big bad” Banksia Men. So it was through Gibbs’ book that generations of children first heard of Banksia, a plant genus found throughout Australia. Today some 171 species are known, 150 from Western Australia, Gibbs’ home for many years.

The name Banksia was coined in 1782 to commemorate English landowner and naturalist Sir Joseph Banks, who travelled on Cook’s first Pacific voyage. Among the plant specimens he collected were the first Banksia specimens seen in Europe. Indeed, his rich botanical haul led the great Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus to suggest New Holland, today’s Australia, should also be called Banksia.

BANKS WAS the only son of a wealthy landowner. He had such a passion for botany that, as a University of Oxford undergraduate, he brought in his own botany tutor from rival university Cambridge. In January 1767, Banks returned from a Canadian expedition and spent the year as a dilettante naturalist and antiquarian.

SNUGGLEPOT AND CUDDLEPIE

Characters created by May Gibbs, such as this evil Banksia Man snatching Little Ragged Blossom (above right) and quintessentially good gumnut babies (above left), helped make ‘the bush’ a place of wonder for generations of young Australians.

During this year, he made many connections with people who were soon to play crucial roles in the very beginnings of scientific classification of plants in Australia.

Banks set up a house in London, the furnishings for which included work by upholsterer Stanfield Parkinson, whose brother Sydney was employed by Banks to draw animal specimens he had brought from Newfoundland. It is thought Sydney had been trained in natural-history illustration in his home town of Edinburgh.

In the mid-1760s, Sydney was employed by horticulturalist James Lee to teach his daughter Ann to draw flowers. It was an acquaintance of Lee’s, physician and naturalist Dr John Fothergill, who helped shape Banks’ ideas about what botany could be.

In 1762, Fothergill began making a botanic garden at Upton Park in Essex. He was particularly interested in plants of medicinal or other economic worth, and, on his garden’s original 12ha, built greenhouses and hothouses some 80m long. He supported plant collectors overseas and amassed a huge collection of his own. As the interesting plants f lowered, he had them painted.

This whole enterprise – plant collectors, living collections and artists –