He made an important contribution to Ooty by appointing McIvor to create the Botanical Gardens. McIvor was by nature quarrelsome, assuming and financially  shrewd and speculative. Yet Cleghorn appointed him over others; and quite rightly so as history proved later.)     

Huge Francis Clarke Cleghorn was born in Madras, but came to Scotland at the age of four to be raised by his aunts and grandfather.  His schooling was at the High School of Edinburgh and Madras Academy, followed by studies at the universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh. At Edinburgh he studied medicine. In 1842 he joined the East India Company as an Assistant Surgeon and returned to Madras. Illness forced Cleghorn back to Britain in 1848, where he stayed for three years, during which he wrote his important report for the British Association on the effects of tropical deforestation, and worked on Indian economic products for the Great Exhibition of 1851. After returning to Madras in 1851 he taught botany and materia medica at the Medical College and was secretary of the Agri-Horticultural Society.

In 1855 he was appointed by Lord Harris, Governor of Madras, to the new post of Conservator of Forests. Before leaving for a second home leave in September 1860 Cleghorn established a forest conservancy system in Madras.

After returning to India in 1861 the rest of Cleghorn’s career was largely spent working on forestry in the NW Himalayas. For a time he acted as Inspector-General of Forests and he has been considered to be the founder of Forest Conservancy in India.

On McIvor Cleghorn reported, ‘Honesty & Conciliatory manners remain grand essentials.  – Dr Wight (Robert Wight) & myself have been strong friends of McIvor and have befriended him in several difficulties, but it has been impossible to absolve him from blame in some matters, when a little suavity of speech would  have made all straight. He is now prosecuting an Officer of the Engineers in the Supreme Court’.

Considering the Herculean task of bringing a large piece of ground ( it was a bushy ravine in fact)  into order, where English experience was  of comparatively little use, and when soil, climate & situation were  entirely different,  Cleghorn recommended a younger man like McIvor whom  he described as a ‘practical Horticulturist & not a Scientific Botanist’.

Nilgiri Documentation Centre

Robert Browne, popularly known as ‘Quintus’ (probably a 5^th child) fought in World War I. He joined the Indian Forest Service in 1920 and  served the next twenty years in Madras, Ooty, Coimbatore and Nilambur. When World War II broke out, he, despite his age, volunteered for military service and was sent to Malaya where he was taken prisoner by the Japanese. He was sent to work on the Death Railway’ which was later immortalized in the classic film ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’.

Because of his age, Browne was  spared ‘coolie work’  and put in charge of the graveyard. Stealing scraps of paper and pencil stubs he not only kept a list of the dead, but he also began writing his autobiography. Hiding in the latrine, he would scribble on scraps of paper in tiny script his story and then ‘bind’ them into notebooks with stolen paper clips. These he stuffed into bottles pilfered from the dispensary and hid them in whatever grave he was digging. The position of each grave with a bottle he marked on a scrap of paper that he kept hidden in his bed. He was taking a tremendous risk; if he had been caught he would have been executed. But what he left for posterity was a splendid record of forestry in the Madras Presidency of the 1920s and 1930s.

It was not about his war or prison camp experience that he wrote, but of the life he and his wife spent in the IFS!

Brown survived the War and returned to India and served as Conservator of Forests, Nilgiris. In 1947, he resigned from the Service and returned to the U.K. He died in 1973 and in 1981 his daughter  who,  after her husband’s death,  transcribed the entire text as a therapy and  published it as a book by the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in 2004.

Browne was a jolly good fellow with a great sense of humour. Foresters after 1885 were trained two years Briton and two years in Europe. Of his European experience Browne wrote candidly, ‘It was a quiet country life, and I don’t remember having learnt very much. Cadets were more interested in fifteen egg omelets and burgundy wine in France, and pastries in Switzerland, than forestry… more time was spent on hunting and fishing’.

During his tenure in Madras, Browne was against American methods of forestry.  He narrated  how foresters resisted the Americanization of the timber forests of the Western Ghats between 1922 and 1929 when American engineers were brought in to help increase extraction. Most of these attempts ended in failure, when cars bogged down in the mud and hillside, and elephants and buffalo once again came to the forefront of the logging industry!!

Nilgiri Documentation Centre

FLOWERS welcome us into the world, and are with us on every festive occasion during our lives, and finally shed their mantle of beauty over us when we die.

We know that King Solomon wrote of flowers, and the Chaldeans, Babylonians and Egyptians studied them. The Arabs appear to have understood that pollen from a date tree must be transferred to a date tree of another kind in order that the fruit may grow. Peas have been found buried in the houses of the Swiss Lake dwellers who lived in the “ Bronze “ Period. In 384 B.C. Aristotle wrote of plants, and in 300 B.C. Theophrates described five hundred plants and their uses for curing diseases; but one of the most interesting men was the old Roman, Pliny the Elder. He was a friend of the Emperors Nero and Titus, and his joy of work seemed indefatigable. His son tells us how his father worked before day-break and continued all day, only stopping when “he was actually in his bath!”

A pioneer of Indian Flora was Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, who visited that country from 1847 to 1851. The queer ways of Englishmen were not so well understood in those days, and he, with his friend Dr. Campbell, were imprisoned by the Raja of Sikkim until an assurance could be given that they had no other evil intention than that of picking flowers!

Whether men care to make a scientific study of plants or not,  most men in their lives make a garden.  In gardens we see the amazing transformations that have been made from wild flowers. And as with  Kipling, “A garden is not made by singing ‘Oh how beautiful’ and sitting in the shade.” The flowers in this book are just a few of the common ones growing in the Nilgiris, and may be seen also in other parts of India.

Of Kurinji it is mentioned:

Down from the Himalayas came the northern tribes of India to settle in the south and among the food for their cattle, donkeys and goats were the seeds of the Strobilanthes flower. They grow only on the hills where the nights are cold and

they seem to love a long-long sleep. They wake up every 5, 8, 9 or 12 years according to the species, but when they do spring to life what a glory they bring. It is as if some magician had waved his wand to wake the sleeping beauty.

The flower is not particularly lovely and has a queer heavy scent. The rather ugly name means a ‘ twisted cone ‘ which is seen in the formation of the flower head, while the Austrian Botanist, Kunthianus, could not resist adding his name to so mystical a plant.

Image : From the net.

Nilgiri Documentation Centre