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@ +฀ChaptEr 4฀∂ Eastward in Eden Botanical Imperialism and Imperialists In 1760 Haidar Ali, soldier of fortune and de facto ruler of Mysore, ordered the creation of a botanical garden in Bangalore, the first in India. He gave it the common name of Lal Bagh, or “red garden,” for its abundance of roses and other red flowers. Inspired by the french gardens in Pondicherry and even more by the Mughal garden in newly conquered Sira, he wanted a similar retreat of his own. Like its Mughal models, it consisted of a series of square parterres intersected by paths lined with fruit trees. Cypresses framed rose bushes and flowerbeds. A small tank at the south end provided water. Haidar augmented the local flora with exotic plants from other regions of India. flowers were one of his few indulgences in a Spartan life of almost constant warfare. A Portuguese soldier serving in one of his regiments recounted how Haidar would walk in his garden of an evening with his concubines, each holding a nosegay of flowers. Those from whom he plucked a bouquet would be his companions for the night.1 Haidar’s son Tipu Sultan extended the gardens. “They please me very much,” commented James Achilles fitzpatrick, British resident at the court 140 ∂ gardEns of EmpirE of Hyderabad, “and are laid out with taste and design, [and] the numerous cypress trees that form the principal avenues are the tallest and most beautiful I ever saw.”2 Tipu shared his father’s love of flowers and was in the habit of presenting a garland of jasmine to guests as a mark of particular favor. frescoes of the battle of Polilur, his greatest triumph against the British, painted for the summer palace, depict him on horseback, incongruously smelling a bouquet of flowers amid the carnage all about him.3 But Tipu was far more educated and cosmopolitan than his father, possessing a “large and curious library.”4 Like his Enlightenment contemporaries in Europe, he was an “improver,” eager to embrace the latest technology and to experiment with new varieties of crops and plants, some from as far away as Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey. He promoted agriculture in his dominions, introducing higher-yielding strains of rice. More significantly, he set up twenty-one stations for silkworm cultivation, with adjoining mulberry plantations, laying the foundations for the later preeminence of Mysore’s silk industry. In the summer of 1788 Tipu sent a stunningly ill-timed embassy to the french king, Louis XvI, in hopes of creating a grand alliance against the East India Company, with which Mysore (and france) had been sporadically at war for several decades. The ambassadors had a thoroughly good time and caused an orientalist furor in the french capital. “They were,” writes Joseph Michaud, “the subject of all conversations, on them all eyes were fixed, and the name of Tippoo Saheb became, for a moment, famous among the lighthearted people who were more struck by the originality of Asiatic costumes than by the importance of their possessions in India.”5 Having soon run through their funds, the envoys reluctantly returned, deeply in debt, bringing with them seeds and bulbs from the Jardin du roi, along with gardeners, engineers, a clockmaker, and a disappointingly small military contingent. A decade later Tipu, ever hopeful of raising armies against the British, sent another embassy to the french colony of Mauritius in the Indian ocean. This, too, was more successful botanically than militarily: the envoys brought back twenty chests of plants and seeds, along with clove and nutmeg trees that required eighty men to carry them over the Western Ghats from the port of Mangalore.6 After Tipu’s death in 1799 at the battle of Srirangapatnam (where he also had an exquisite garden that reminded Lady Clive of Chantilly), the Lal Bagh passed into the possession of the victorious British army, presided over by a + 141 EastWard in EdEn British officer who amused himself stocking it with European and Chinese plants until he was transferred elsewhere and handed the garden over to the Madras Presidency. After several decades of intermittent neglect, William new, a Kew-trained gardener, was put in charge. new energetically resuscitated the garden and made it a botanical showplace, adding plantings from China, South Africa, the Indian ocean, and Kew, as well as walks and avenues of fast-growing Grevillea robusta. Under new and his successors, it became a center of scientific research and oversaw the development of plants of ornamental and...

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