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Environment and Nature in New Zealand Feb 2008

Acclimatisation and the "Europeanisation" of New Zealand, 1830s-1920s?

James Beattie
University of Waikato

Successive waves of migrants – first Polynesian, then European and others – released into Aotearoa/New Zealand a Noah’s Ark of animals and a cornucopia of cultivatable plants. Accompanying these were also less desirable entrants that would in time earn derogatory names such as ‘Old Man’s Beard’ (Clematis vitalba) or ‘Onehunga weed’ (Soliva sessilis). While Polynesian settlement in Aotearoa wrought considerable environmental change over the centuries with the emergence of distinctive “Maori” cultures, the onset of organised European migration released a veritable biological floodgate, connecting New Zealand with global markets in seeds and plants.[1] An indication of this mania for acclimatisation by the early twentieth century comes from contemporary comments made by the Director of Dunedin’s Botanic Garden David Tannock (1873-1952). Tannock claimed (with some justification), that the ‘whole world is being ransacked to provide [plant] novelties’.[2] 

These changes were fuelled by a variety of intersecting motives: nostalgia, economic necessity, aesthetic considerations, religious justifications – even health.[3] But one image struck observers about the intent of colonists: their desire to remake New Zealand in the image of Britain, to plant in effect a ‘Better Britain’ in the southern seas. Images of an improved garden flourished in colonial literature of the period, and appealed to significant numbers of Maori too.[4] Exemplifying this push and writing thousands of miles away from New Zealand in Portobello (Edinburgh), Reverend Burns, future leader of the Otago Settlement, wandered with a ‘prophetic eye’ over the Dunedin of the future. He saw:

the noble plains of Otago some generations hence to mark the future herds and flocks that cover the upland pastures far away to the ranges of the snowy mountains – whilst the lower lying valleys are waving with the yellow corn and the pursuits of rural husbandry the pretty farms, “the busy mile” and the happy smiling cottages by the way side or nestling among the trees in some “bosky deiyle” or sylvan dell – and all that a God fearing people – with a bold peasantry their country’s pride and an aristocracy whose highest honour it is that they are the disciples of Christ.[5]

Or, as Captain Fraser succintly told the Legislative Council, ‘God intended the land for men and they must put men on it’.[6] Over the decades such aims were promoted in wasteland regulations encouraging Europeans to develop fallow ground and by successive governments as they tried to prise Maori from their land on the fiction that it they did not use it all.[7] By the early twentieth century, New Zealand functioned as a giant farm, sending wool, meat, and dairy products to overseas, mostly British, buyers.[8] While it is easy to damn such policies, we must remember that we share in the legacy of such visions today: whether they are the lush fertiliser-fed pastures of dairy farming or the Mediterranean landscapes of olive groves and wineries.  

If New Zealand in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was all about creating a neo-Europe, what are we to make of images of Chinese gardener-horticulturalists tending plots in Central Otago? What are we to make of India-born Sir John Cracroft Wilson? Wilson named Cashmere, Christchurch, because it reminded him of the hills around Moradabad – albeit without the mangoes – and around which he planted ginger and curry spices, bamboos and rhododendrons?[9] Or, what of health reformer Frederick Truby King who after returning from a trip to Japan in 1904 with his wife, set about constructing a small Japanese garden of ‘stepping stones and Japanese pergolas’ and planting ‘crab apples and maple trees which they had brought with them’ from this country?[10]

This article attempts to answer such awkward questions, such apparent conundrums of colonisation that complicate our received historical picture of bi-cultural nineteenth century New Zealand. The intention of this article is three-fold. First, it sets out to challenge ideas that acclimatisation into New Zealand was of solely British or European species. Second, it puts forward new research questions that challenge dominant interpretations of New Zealand’s biological ‘colonisation’. Third, it presents a case study of the acclimatisation of New Zealand species overseas, an attempt essentially to complicate the dominant picture of weak New Zealand species being overrun by ‘European’ ones.  Necessarily I adopt a case-study approach as the intention is to stimulate new scholarship in these fields, rather than achieve a comprehensive overview.

New Zealand, I believe, did not approximate quite so neatly as a destination for the ‘English diaspora’ as environmental historians like Thomas Dunlap make out. For one thing, this view elides over the Scottish contribution to the making of the British diaspora and the complex make-up of identities, religions, and classes within Britain itself.[11] Nor was it entirely the case that, as Dunlap writes, from ‘New York to Sydney people walked on European grass growing in imitation of English meadows, and the commonest birds they way were starlings, pigeons, and English sparrows’ while ‘In rural areas European crops filled the fields and European weeds the roadside ditches’.[12] That might well have been the initial intention or belief of colonists, but it was far from the reality.

The reality, as scholars such as J.H. Casid and others point out is that many of the species seemingly ‘British’ in origin actually were arrivals from overseas, some recent, some not. Indeed, Casid goes so far as to suggest that the landscape parks so enjoyed by the British actually better represented an amalgalm of plants from throughout its empire arranged in a particular way to satisfy aesthetic criteria, than a garden displaying solely British plants.[13]  (Of course, many species from overseas became indigenised and/or new cultivars, a point I develop below.) As Libby Robin has recently argued, while colonists in Australia initially sought to remake the land in the image of Britain, increasingly they discovered that neither the soil nor the climate would sustain such a transformation.[14] In the same vein, Ian Tyrrell has demonstrated the significant ways in which Australian and Californian species criss-crossed continents, while for New Zealand, both John P. Adam and Alan Grey have independently highlighted the significant environmental connections between this country and North America.[15] 

The fact is, New Zealand was more hybrid, more environmentally complicated than many have made out. This should really come as no surprise if one stares hard at that period of its history, a period when New Zealand became connected with the world beyond the Pacific, when New Zealand formed a red piece in the jigsaw of the British Empire. The British Empire was a remarkably polyglot, multicultural space in which ideas, people, objects and plants circulated in complex ways.[16] As recent historical scholarship is showing, New Zealand was not solely European or Maori. Significant numbers of Chinese lived, worked and shaped the history of New Zealand. Significant numbers of its European population were born outside Europe or spent their formative years there – India, Africa, North America, Australia, etc. Many influences from Asia and elsewhere were also interpreted in new ways by people in New Zealand, notably in terms of fashions, ideas and designs.[17] 

In ecological terms, remarkably little, for instance, has been written about the medley of plants originating in Asia that came into New Zealand, or even about the important role of Chinese in introducing garden practices and plants from their homeland.[18] In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial consumers fuelled a feverish, trans-continental hunt for plants that honed in on Asia.[19] New Zealand gardeners, prizing Asian varieties for their colour, brightness and texture, procured plants from a variety of sources. For wealthy owners, the rarer the plants the better, for rarity enhanced their owner’s status. In fact, a great many European collectors in New Zealand recognised the origin of particular species, in part because the plants were new arrivals and in part because the plants’ origins signfied something of the status of the gardener.

Of the great variety of species flooding into New Zealand, rhododendrons and chrysanthemums remained particular favourites as they do to this day. For instance, a report of the 1870s describing the Dunedin nursery of David Thomson in Kaikorai Valley particularly noted ‘A beautiful tea-scented China’ rose that had grown ten feet and ‘had flowered twice this season’.[20] The stock-list of prominent Christchurch nurseryman William Wilson for May 1876 alone included 5,000 rhododendrons[21] while The Gums, the garden of wealthy Hutt Valley settler and enthusiastic gardener Thomas Mason (1818-1903), contained a goodly number of harder-to-obtain Chinese species. Writing in 1883, Mason seemed particularly proud of his procurement (from Australia?) of ‘some 30 varieties of the Chinese Tree Peony (Poenia Moutan [sic])’ all of which ‘seem quite at home [in his garden] and are remarkable for their growth and beauty.’[22] At the same time, a craze for Japanese plants and, later, elements of garden design swept through fashionable New Zealand society from the mid nineteenth century.[23] Settlers obtained these species from a variety of sources, including nurseries in Australia, Europe, North America and Asia, all of which evince the truly global nature of plant trading in the nineteenth century.[24] 

Interpreting acclimatisation

Historical scholarship on acclimatisation has understandably zoomed in on the deleterious impacts of this process, presenting a kind of apocalyptic narrative of loss and destruction.[25] In the process, it has often ignored the continued role of Maori in choosing and adapting overseas biota after colonisation, as if Maori suddenly ceased all agricultural innovation and chose not to take advantage of the new varieties of crops and animals becoming available. From the 1830s, if not earlier, growing numbers of Maori made the missionaries’ agricultural revolution their own—at their own pace and on their own terms. Maori competed with each other to buy Bibles, erect flour mills and sell produce for profit in local and overseas markets. Maori also appear to have adapted their own varieties of potatoes and cultivated these in a variety of settings.[26]

Second, there has been a remarkable silence about the impact of New Zealand plants overseas. Perhaps this is because introduced plants and animals have had such a damaging (and such an emotionally traumatic) effect on recent writers who have consequently focussed on this process? Or, perhaps it is because of the neo-Darwinian models that some writers have used? Take the case put forward by leading environmental historian Alfred Crosby, whose book, Ecological Imperialism…, devotes a chapter to New Zealand. Crosby’s central argument is that the organisms – plants, pathogens and animals – European settlers brought to new lands swept aside more vulnerable indigenous organisms and so were as central to colonization as its imperial policies or military capabilities.[27] The implication of Crosby’s arguments is twofold: that plant material flowed in a one-way direction, outwards from a dominant Europe; and that non-European people and plants were passive victims of European colonization and the organisms they brought with them.

This is far too simplistic an argument, one that ignores the complexity of plant transfers and the historical reality of the nineteenth century. For one thing, plant transfers did not follow a linear, one-way path, but took infinitely more complex routes, being adapted and channelled more often than not through insitutions and individuals in their global travels.[28] In a paper on botanical exchanges, Eric Pawson comments that such transfers created ‘hybridised landscapes and plants’, a phenomenon seldom recognised today. After a certain period of time particular species became ‘nativised’ in the host culture. Pawson, for instance, describes the ways in which a species such as the New Zealand Cabbage Tree (Cordyline australis) had been ‘nativised’ in Torbay, Devon, and is now known locally as the Torbay palm.[29] Like many other species from New Zealand, this had been introduced into the British Isles in the nineteenth century. In 1877, the doyen of nineteenth century imperialism and botany, J.D. Hooker (1817-1911), noted that other than Cordyline indivisa, in England ‘the other 3 Cordylines…grow like weeds, flower & fruit’.[30] Likewise, the Dunedin nurseryman, William Martin, established a world-wide reputation through his hybridizing of rhododendrons, most notably ‘Marquis of Lothian’.[31] In another example, around the city of Newcastle, New South Wales, many New Zealand species of karaka (Corynocarpus laevigatus) and pohutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) grow, introduced by eccentric park designer and artist Alfred Sharpe (1836-1908) from the late 1880s.[32]

The account which follows illustrates the remarkable number of plants from New Zealand under cultivation in Scotland by the end of the 1870s. But, more than this, it engages with a significant contemporary debate regarding the ability of plants to acclimatise, a debate framed around the notion of displacement. Intellectual heir of Crosby’s ‘ecological imperialism’, displacement held powerful sway over nineteenth century scientists like Charles Darwin (1809-82), J.D. Hooker and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), who firmly believed that the ‘displacement’ of native plants, animals and humans by European or northern species was inevitable. Only by the end of that century did scientists in greater numbers come to question this interpretation.[33] William Gorrie’s article therefore adds to this debate by highlighting exceptions to this rule while also acknowleding the difficulties in propagating certain species. Gorrie’s work, as he put it, describes those New Zealand plants growing in Scotland which survived the harsh northern winter of 1878/9 and which therefore ‘may be looked upon as sufficiently hardy for our [Scottish] climate’ (52). Signficantly, his article appears not to have even registered a modicum of interest from such stars of the nineteenth century world as Darwin, Hooker or Wallace.

If it had, they might have been intrigued to read of the variety and extent of New Zealand species which had been growing in Scotland for quite a number of years, some in hot houses, others in the open air. Gorrie, for instance, believed that the Plagianthus betunlinus (ribbonwood) displayed qualities of ‘remarkable’ (53) toughness while the Coriaria ruscifolia (tutu) ‘stood most winters unharmed, and had only the points of their shoots injured by frosts of unusual severity’ (55).

The author of the article, William Gorrie, appears never to have come to New Zealand, noting in his article that he relied on plants sent to him by friends in Otago and Canterbury.[34] Gorrie (1811-81) was born in Perthshire and appears to have spent his working life as a gardener to Messer P. Lawson, nurseryman.[35] Well respected in the botanical community, he served as President of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh and contributed a number of papers on economic botany. For instance, in 1877, he published a paper on the Tree Mallow (Lavatera abborea), a newly available plant in Britain. Gorrie focussed on its potential for use as a food for cattle and in paper making, a publication which also received attention in at least one New Zealand newspaper of the time.[36] A précis of the paper on New Zealand species growing in Scotland at the end of the the 1870s, which is republished below, was introduced by Dr James Hector on 20 July 1880 to the Auckland Institute, with a written précis also appearing the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute of that same year.[37]

Gorrie’s work is most probably best understood in the context of the great explosion of interest in natural history in British society that took place in the nineteenth century.[38] Growing leisure time and increasing wealth among the middle classes meant that natural history was commonly pursued in conjunction with other activities like antiquarianism and geology, all three serving as an index of respectability and regarded as a ‘gentlemanly’ pursuit that had the additional benefit of contributing to the improving ethos of the day through new scientific discoveries.[39] For women, too, although opportunities lessened as the nineteenth century lengthened, natural history offered one of the few socially sanctioned pastimes that allowed them to contribute to science, usually through botanical drawing and collecting and by writing botanical works aimed at a popular or juvenile audience.[40] Natural history also played an important part in self-education and improvement among the working classes. A bewildering number of publications championed its cause, not only as an intrinsic good but also as a means of ensuring both moral quietitude and good health.[41]  The work of William Gorrie may therefore be understood in this context, a period in which natural history flourished and in which amateurs could still contribute to the growing field.

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Paul Star and Professor Eric Pawson for their comments and information as well as Jenny McGhee for extra biographical information on William Gorrie and Rosie Morrison for scanning William Gorrie’s article. The Hocken Library, Dunedin, kindly allowed me to republish this article, which is bound with other pamphlets in Hoc:Chapman Pamphlets v.99, no.7, while I also thank Jill Haley, Archivist, Otago Settlers Museum, for her help. A Small Research Grant from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Waikato, facilitated my more recent research in Dunedin archives.

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