Botany and the Indian Forest Service: an early controversy about the education of foresters

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Notes

1. Roger Underwood is the author of the recently published Foresters of the Raj—Stories from Indian and Australian Forests which deals with the development of forestry in India during the nineteenth century. This book contains a full bibliography of the literature relating to forestry in India and nineteenth-century forestry education, the study of which underpinned this essay.

1. The names Indian Forest Department and Indian Forest Service have always been used interchangeably.

2. Cooper’s Hill College was the colloquial name of the British college of Civil Engineering run by the India Office to train civil engineers for service in India. It operated in Surrey from 1872 until 1906 when the work was transferred to India.

3. Sir Dietrich Brandis (1824–1907) was the first Inspector-General of Forests in India, and is regarded as ‘the father of Indian forestry’ and the grandfather of the ‘colonial forestry’ model adopted in most English-speaking countries in the early years of the twentieth century. He came to forestry from botany, and returned to botany following his retirement, after a distinguished career in forest administration and management. In his eighties, he produced the definitive book on The Trees of India, still in print more than a century later. There is a biographical essay on Brandis in Foresters of the Raj.

4. David (later Sir David) Hutchins (1850–1920) was a professional forester trained at Nancy in France. He worked as a forest officer for 10 years in India. As well as serving as Conservator of Forests in the Cape Colony, he was Conservator of Forests in Cypress and Chief Conservator of the British East African Forest Service. He undertook a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1914–1915 and produced an influential and controversial report. This played an important part in the establishment of professional forestry in both countries.

5. Dendrology, or forest botany, is that branch of plant systematics dealing with the naming, classification and identification of trees. It was once a fundamental component of the syllabus for professional foresters. When I was a forestry student (1959–1962), I was required to pass Botany I and Botany II at the University of Western Australia and undertook a whole year of dendrology (which included forest ecology) at the Australian Forestry School.