Charles Frazer (botanist)

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Charles Frazer or Fraser or Frazier (* 1788 in Blair Atholl , Perthshire , Scotland , † September 22, 1831 in Parramatta , New South Wales ) was a gardener and was appointed colonial botanist in the penal colony of Australia .

Its official botanical author's abbreviation is " C. Fraser ".

Life

Charles Frazer was born in Blair Atholl in 1788. He later worked as a gardener, presumably on the extensive grounds of the Duke of Atholl , and thereby had connections to the botanical gardens in Edinburgh and Glasgow .

In 1815 Frazer joined the 56th Regiment of the British Army as a soldier and came to Sydney on April 8, 1816 on a convict transport . After being transferred to the 46th (November 1816) and the 48th regiment (August 1817), Fraser was discharged from the army on January 6, 1821 and officially appointed colonial botanist by Governor Lachlan Macquarie , a position he had been informal since 1819 Had kept.

In the following decade, under Fraser's leadership, the Sydney Botanic Gardens developed into one of the world's most famous botanical gardens . Frazer built the Royal Botanic Gardens on Double Bay in Sydney on the size of six hectares at the time, where he successfully cultivated almost 3,000 plant species from Great Britain by 1825. He also experimented with the distillation of eucalyptus oil and the planting of cotton , for which he with a gold medal of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society was excellent. Three plants are named after him.

More than thirty plant species are named after him, including species in the genera Acacia , Allocasuarina , Boronia , Dryandra , Ficus , Hakea , Marsdenia , Persoonia , Sophora and Swainsona . Its specimens can now be seen mainly in the herbaria of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew , the Natural History Museum in London, the Druce Fielding Collection at the University of Oxford and the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney.

Charles Frazer died of a stroke on December 22, 1831 in Parramatta , New South Wales .

Expeditions

Frazer was a member of three expeditions led by John Oxley : 1817 to the Lachlan River and Macquarie River , 1918 to the north-east of New South Wales and 1819 to the area around Port Macquarie and the Hastings River .

With John Thomas Bigge he came twice to Van Diemens Land , New Zealand and Norfolk Island .

In early 1827 Frazer was called to accompany the military James Stirling (1791-1865) during the Swan River expedition . The expedition was supposed to clarify whether the area around the Swan River on the west coast of Australia was suitable as a location for a new British settlement. Frazer's report on the quality of the soil was instrumental in the decision to establish the Swan River Colony in Western Australia .

In 1828 he traveled with Allan Cunningham to the Moreton Bay .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Norman Hall: Botanists of the Eucalypts , Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia, 1978, 0-643-00271-5 ( English )
  2. ↑ adb.edu.au : Frazer, Charles (1788–1831), in English, accessed June 7, 2012.
  3. ↑ Frazer's biography in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (English); Retrieved August 19, 2017
  4. ↑ Article " DEATH " in the Sydney Monitor , December 31, 1831, page 3, Family News (English); Retrieved from the National Library of Australia pages on August 19, 2017
  5. ↑ Article “ 95 YEARS AGO - BOTANIC GARDENS - HOW THE SITE WAS CHOSEN ” in the Brisbane Courier , July 3, 1923, page 11 (English); Retrieved from the National Library of Australia pages on August 19, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Frazer, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fraser, Charles; Frazier, Charles
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Australian botanist and explorer
DATE OF BIRTH 1788
PLACE OF BIRTH Blair Atholl , Perthshire , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH September 22, 1831
Place of death Parramatta , New South Wales