Reginald Farrer

Reginald John Farrer (born February 17, 1880 in Marylebone , London , † October 17, 1920 in Nyitadi, Burma ) was an English writer , painter and plant collector.

Life

His father, James Anson Farrer (1849-1925), was a wealthy lawyer , author and landowner from Clapham in the North Riding of Yorkshire , his mother Elizabeth ("Bessie") Georgina Ann Reynell-Pack daughter of a professional officer.

Farrer was born with a harelip and a wolf's throat and therefore operated on repeatedly as a child. The malformation of the palate made it difficult to articulate. Up until the age of 15, only his mother understood what he was saying. Therefore, he was raised at home at Clapham and Newnham Rectory. His mother served in the church and charities. Farrer was already interested in plants as a child. When his father inherited the Ingleborough estate in Yorkshire in 1889 , the 14-year-old Farrer redesigned the rock garden . He published an article about a local occurrence of the sand herb Arenaria gothica on Ingleborough Fell in the Journal of Botany . Later he used to take visitors to the estate up to the Fells in order to show them the flora there. From 1898 to 1902 he studied classical literature "Greats" (Literae Humaniores) at the exclusive Balliol College , Oxford , from which he graduated with a very poor result (third) , perhaps due to illness . During his student days he helped Pastor HJ Bidder set up the rock garden at St John's College . He also made friends with his fellow students Aubrey Herbert , a future diplomat, and Raymond Asquith and founded the debating club "Ganymede".

In 1901 Farrer founded a nursery in Clapham that specialized in rock garden plants. She won several awards at the Chelsea Flower Show . However, it had to close at the start of the war in 1914, as the English gardens were now intended to be self-sufficient.

In Japan Farrer made the acquaintance of the English travel writer Gertrude Bell and her brother Hugo Bell. He started collecting plants here. He also studied the garden art of Japan, which inspired him, and published a book on the subject. On the return trip from Japan Farrer wrote his first novel, published in 1906 and praised by Virginia Woolf in the Times Literary Supplement . His next book was based on the transmigration theory . Like Orlando , it had a heroine who changed her gender. However, it was poorly received by critics, as did his subsequent novels. Farrer's novels contain sharply and at times viciously observed details of the life of the British upper class, but his biographer Nicola Shulman judges their plot to be "unnecessarily complicated".

His father had disapproved of Farrer's high expenses on the trip to Japan. Farrer spent the next ten years on his father's estate, where he expanded his nursery and laid out several gardens. Since his father did not provide him with enough workers, Farrer had to look after them largely himself, a novelty at the time. Farrer's rock garden, laid out on the cliff of Ingleborough, was believed to be the only natural rock garden in England. To put it on, Farrer had to abseil, allegedly also shooting from a boat made of seeds from his rifle onto the steep rocks. Nothing is left of the system today. Farrer also designed a garden for his college friend Aubrey Herbert in Pixton .

Like his father, Farrer was a member of the Liberal Party and became a Justice of the Peace for West Yorkshire. He ran for Ashford , Kent , in 1910 . In the election he spoke out in favor of free trade . However, he lost the election to Conservative candidate Lawrence Hardy, perhaps also because he allegedly used the £ 1,000 his father, Liberal Member of the House of Commons for Skipton , had given him for election expenses to buy cypripedia . In addition, he had little feeling for public relations and left a benefit concert of the Liberal Party because of its poor quality.

On his Ceylon trip in 1907, Farrer became a Buddhist to the horror of his family , as his cousin Edith Sitwell reports.

Farrer was declared unfit for military service after his return from China in 1916 and worked as a journalist in the British Ministry of Information under John Buchan until it was dissolved in 1918. It was the only time he got paid work. However, propaganda journalism disgusted him.

Farrer reportedly had an affair with a geisha but never married. In some of his works the contrast between wife and concubine is highlighted.

Farrer died in 1920 near the British Hill Station Nyitadi east of the Irrawaddy in Min Shan , where he was collecting plants and working on a new novel, according to the absent Cox of diphtheria . This seems doubtful, however, as he had already survived this illness during his student days at Oxford. Farrer was buried in Kawngglanghpu , not, as Cox claims, in Konglu . A small memorial stone in the family garden in Ingleborough bears the words He died for love and duty in search of rare plants. The diary of his last trip was destroyed by his mother, the manuscript of his last novel The Empty House and the collected seeds remained at the place of his death. His detailed herbarium, as well as letters to his mother and plant collectors such as Edward Augustus Bowles and Isaac Bayley Balfour, are kept in the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens . In 2005, his family gave the Botanical Garden additional documents and drawings. Some of the photographs are on permanent loan from the Lakeland Horticultural Society.

Works

Farrer had planned a career as a writer and published five novels and two verse, but these are largely forgotten today.

• Herod through the Opera Glass. A tragedy in three acts [A parody of Stephen Phillips' “Herod”]. Oxford, BH Blackwell (1901)
• The Garden of Asia, Impressions from Japan. Methuen and Co. (1904)
• The House of Shadows. London, Edward Arnold (1906)
• The sundered streams. The history of a memory that had no full stops. London, Edward Arnold (1907)
• My Rock Garden. London, Edward Arnold (1907)
• The Dowager of Jerusalem: a romance in four acts [Versepos]. London, Edward Arnold (1908)
• Alpines and Bog Plants. London, Edward Arnold (1908)
• The Ways of Rebellion. London, Edward Arnold (1908)
• The Anne-Queen's Chronicle, being a history of the last five months, faithfully recounted, in the life of the Lady Anne, Marquis of Pembroke, Queen-Consort of England. London, Alston Rivers (1909)
• In a Yorkshire Garden. London, Edward Arnold (1909)
• In Old Ceylon. London, Edward Arnold (1910)
• Among the Hills, a book of Joy in high Places (1911)
• Through the ivory gates. (1912)
• The Rock Garden (1912)
• Vasanta the beautiful, a homily in four acts. London, Bradbury, Agnew & Co. (1913).
• The Dolomites, King Laurin's Garden (1913)
• On the Eaves of the World, A botanical exploration of the borders of China and Tibet. London, Edward Arnold (1917)
• The Void of War: letters from three fronts. London, Constable & Co. (1918)
• The English Rock Garden. London, TC & EC Jack (1919)
• The Rainbow Bridge. London, Edward Arnold (1921)
  • Article in "Gardener's Gazette"
  • Translations from French

to travel

• 1903 Japan, Beijing and Korea
• 1908 Ceylon
• 1910 Northern Italy and south-east France, Cottian Alps , Graian Alps and Sea Alps
• Dolomites , Dauphiné Alps and Sea Alps , with Edward Augustus Bowles
• 1914–1915 Gansu , northwest China and Tibet with the gardener and plant collector William Purdom with funds from Arthur Kilpin Bulley, the Royal Horticultural Society , Frederick Stern and EA Bowles, among others .
• 1920–1921 Hpimaw in Min Shan in the highlands of Northern Burma , for the first year together with Euan Hillhouse Methven Cox, a Scottish jute manufacturer from Dundee who was interested in botany. He later wrote a book about Farrer's last expedition.

Appreciation

Farrer published numerous initial descriptions of plants from tropical southwest China, although he had to compete with Frank Kingdon Ward and George Forrest in the area . Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Farrer ".

Today his book on rock gardens is mainly read. The travel reports contain very poetic descriptions of plants, perhaps a little pompous for today's taste. His biographer Basil Morgan describes his style in the English Rock Garden as "... long-winded, opinionated, and at times perverse". According to Richard Wilford, the book is known for "... flowery prose and strong opinions." The poet and gardener Vita Sackville-West, on the other hand, compared his prose with that of DH Lawrence and saw him as "half poet, half botanist".

Farrer's landscapes from Gansu, often painted under difficult conditions, were exhibited by the renowned Fine Art Society in 1918 .

Numerous plants were named after Farrer:

• Allium farreri
• Allium cyathoporum var. Farreri , Gansu leek
• Amitostigma farreri
• Bulbophyllum farreri
• Codonopsis farreri
• Cypripedium farreri
• Gentiana farreri
• Geranium farreri , seeds collected by Farrer in 1914 in Min Schan on the border between Gansu and Sichuan , first description by Otto Stapf in the Curtis Botanical Magazine in 1926 .
• Picea farreri
• Viburnum farreri

He exported other plants to England for the first time, such as B .:

• Stellera chasmaejasme

Farrer was opposed to organized nature conservation , and according to his own statements, he always clung to himself in mockery when he saw signs calling for the protection of edelweiss , as every connoisseur of the matter knows there is more than enough of it.

Memberships and honors

Farrer was a member of the exclusive Horticultural Club. In 1920 the Royal Geographical Society awarded him the Gill Memorial Medal, which honors geographic discoveries. The museum in Settle, North Yorkshire, dedicated an exhibition to Farrer in 2003.

swell

• Basil Morgan, Farrer, Reginald John (1880-1920), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Sept. 2012 accessed Dec. 19, 2016 .
• Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002.
• Euan Hillhouse Methven Cox, Farrer's Last Journey, Upper Burma 1919–1920. London, Dulau & Co. 1926.
• WR Mitchell, Reginald Farrer: at home in the Yorkshire Dales. Giggleswick, Castleberg 2002.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 16
2. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 48
3. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 22
4. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 20
5. ↑ http://www.northcravenheritage.org.uk/nchtjournal/Journals/1992/J92A13.html
6. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 24
7. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 31
8. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 35
9. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 52
10. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 52
11. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 36
12. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 60
13. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 59
14. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 59
15. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 35-37
16. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 101f.
17. ↑ Image in archived copy ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
18. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 119
19. ↑ GB 235 RJF / 1
20. ↑ https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/911faa24-523f-34ad-bcb2-7f8648cef3f0
21. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 23
22. ^ Richard Wilford, Alpines from Mountain to Garden. Botanical Magazine Monographs, London, Board of Trustees of Kew Gardens 2010, 170
23. ↑ https://www.glendoick.com/Glendoick-History
24. ^ Basil Morgan, 'Farrer, Reginald John (1880-1920)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Sept 2012 accessed 19/12/2016 .
25. ^ Richard Wilford, Alpines from Mountain to Garden. Botanical Magazine Monographs, London, Board of Trustees of Kew Gardens 2010, 170
26. ^ Nicola Shulman, A Rage for Rock Gardening. The Story of Reginald Farrer, Gardener, Writer and Plant Collector. London, Short Books, 2002, 51
27. ↑ http://www.northcravenheritage.org.uk/nchtjournal/Journals/1992/J92A13.html
28. ^ Richard Wilford, Alpines from Mountain to Garden. Botanical Magazine Monographs, London, Board of Trustees of Kew Gardens 2010, 170. Illustration of the herbarium under Archived Copy ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
29. ^ Richard Wilford, Alpines from Mountain to Garden. Botanical Magazine Monographs, London, Board of Trustees of Kew Gardens 2010, 171
30. ^ Reginald Farrer, Among the Hills, Afterword (London 1978, 323)
31. ↑ http://www.ncbpt.org.uk/folly/exhibitions/exhibitions_2003/