Wardian Case

From Wikicliki
Jump to: navigation, search

Wardian Cases https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Curtis%27s_Botanical_Magazine,_Volume_73_(1847).djvu/45 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Curtis%27s_Botanical_Magazine/Volume_73/4285 https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=dOA2pFHQG4AC&pg=PA289&lpg=PA289&dq=wardian+case+raffles&source=bl&ots=Id4vbsexIc&sig=XX5xr-UVj7SVGZeKhEWPj0i5wC8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjhjN6j6MfPAhVEtY8KHXjlCwYQ6AEILzAD#v=onepage&q=wardian%20case%20raffles&f=false

Sir S. Raffles is anxious that we should give publicity to our researches, in one way or other, and has planned bringing out something at Bencoolen. He proposes sending home these Pitcher-plants, that such splendid things may appear under all the advantages of elegant execution, by way of attracting attention to the subject of Sumatran botany." Many of 1)r, Jack's plants did appear in the Malayan Miscellany, published at Bencoolen; but no plants of theNepenthes Rafflesiana ever reached Europe alive; till the Royal Gardens was supplied with a case of them, through the kindness of Capt. Bethune, R.N., who, on his return from his scientific mission to Borneo, had a Wardian case filled with them ; and so well were the plants established in the case, and so great was the care taken of them overland from India, that they were as healthy on their arrival at Kew in 1845 as the day they were transplanted from their native glen in Singapore. It was the very year in which Dr. Jack writes, that, as is well known, at the suggestion of his friend and patron, Sir Stamford Raffles, the island of Singapore was purchased by the India Company of the Sultan of Johore.

More importantly, the Wardian case unleashed a revolution in the mobility of commercially important plants. In Wardian cases, Robert Fortune shipped to British India 20,000 tea plants smuggled out of Shanghai, China, to begin the tea plantations of Assam. After germination of imported seeds in the heated glasshouses of Kew, seedlings of the rubber tree of Brazil were shipped successfully in Wardian cases to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the new British territories in Malaya to start the rubber plantations. Wardian cases have thus been credited for helping break geographic monopolies in the production of important agricultural goods.