Roland Edgar Cooper
More actions
| Roland Edgar Cooper | |
|---|---|
 Cooper 1486, cannabis collected in the Timpu valley of Bhutan in July 1914 and held by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (CC BY-SA 2.5)
| |
| Born | 1890 Kingston upon Thames, England |
| Died | 1962 |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Plant collector and horticulturist |
| Institutions | Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; Maymyo Botanic Garden |
| Known for | Plant collections from Sikkim, Bhutan and the Punjab for A. K. Bulley, 1913–1916 |
| Collector name on accessions | R.E. Cooper |
Roland Edgar Cooper (1890–1962) was a British plant collector and horticulturist who gathered plants and seed in Sikkim in 1913, in Bhutan in 1914 and 1915 and in the western Himalaya in 1916 for A. K. Bulley of Ness in Cheshire.[1][2] Alan Elliott calls him the second major plant collector to enter Bhutan, after William Griffith in 1837.[2] He was later Curator of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh from 1934 to 1950.[1] The garden holds five sheets of Cannabis sativa from his 1914 collecting in Bhutan.
His forename is spelled Roland in his own published work, in the Edinburgh archive that holds his papers and in the Edinburgh herbarium catalogue.[3][1][4] The International Plant Names Index and the Harvard University Herbaria index of botanists give Rowland Edgar Cooper for the same dates.[5][6] The standard author abbreviation is R.E.Cooper.[5]
Early life and training
Cooper was born in Kingston upon Thames in 1890 and had lost both parents by the age of four.[1] He came to be cared for by his aunt Emma, who was married to the botanist William Wright Smith, later Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.[1] He came under their guardianship at sixteen.[2]
In 1907 he went to Calcutta with Smith, who had become keeper of the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden there.[1] He studied botany and horticulture in Calcutta and later at the Lloyd Botanic Garden in Darjeeling, under George Thomas Lane, the curator at Calcutta.[2] He went with Smith on collecting trips. Elliott places them in Sikkim and on the borders of Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet; the Edinburgh archive says that he collected specimens in Sikkim, Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan.[2][1] In 1910 he returned to Scotland with Smith and took the horticultural course at Edinburgh.[1] He had intended to become a fruit farmer in British Columbia and was tutored by Isaac Bayley Balfour.[2]
Collecting for Bulley
In 1913 Cooper returned to the Himalaya to collect plants for A. K. Bulley of Ness, near Liverpool.[1] Smith and Balfour encouraged him to lead the expedition, which Bulley sponsored. Its main purpose, like that of his later trips, was to bring garden novelties into cultivation, with botanical collecting secondary.[2] The printed label on his Bhutan sheets reads "R. E. Cooper, Collector for A. K. Bulley, Esq., Cheshire."[7] A map in his papers, marked with his routes, carries the legend "RE Cooper's visit to Kulu and Lahaol, 1916, seed collecting for A.K. Bulley, Neston, Cheshire".[1]
Sikkim, 1913
His 1913 season began at Kurseong and took him through Darjeeling, Pallut on the Nepal border, Gangtok, the Chumbi Valley approaches and the Lachen and Yangtang valleys. Over 500 seed collections from the trip reached Edinburgh through Bulley, many of which neither germinated nor persisted in cultivation. The trip yielded few new garden plants and was judged a failure. His best-known horticultural find from Sikkim was Primula calderiana, which he described with Balfour.[2] His chief collector on this and his later trips was Rohmoo, a Lepcha from Sikkim.[2]
Bhutan, 1914 and 1915
After the Sikkim season Cooper obtained permission to enter Bhutan in 1914. His own account says that the expeditions of 1914 and 1915 were made solely for collecting botanical material and that 348 days were spent in the country.[3] He wrote that the 1914 tour "started in July and finished in November". Because Bhutan had had only official visitors, the party had to call on each valley's governor, and the first valley traversed was that of the Rydak (Wong or Thimbu) River, north of Buxa. Cooper wrote that the season's main seed harvest was therefore obtained only from Thimbu.[3] The 1915 tour crossed the frontier at Buxa in April and went westward to Paro, then east towards Punakha, Tongsa and Pumthang. It reached the frontier again in October.[3]
His Bhutan collection ran to 3,958 numbers and included 42 species of Rhododendron and 51 of Primula. Of these collections, 63 served to describe new species or varieties, 32 of which are still recognised.[2] Among the plants Cooper named with Balfour were Primula eburnea and Rhododendron rhabdotum.[3] His Sikkim and Bhutan specimens were used extensively in writing the Flora of Bhutan.[2]
Cooper's papers at Edinburgh include an itinerary of the Bhutan tours, and notebooks with notes on his travels and on forest distribution.[1] In 1933 he credited most of the harvest to his collectors, "Lepchas from Sikkim, recruited in Darjeeling", and wrote that their gatherings represented "little more than an occasional mouthful snatched on the move".[3]
Punjab, 1916
His third commission, again sponsored by Bulley, took him up the Kullu valley, over the Rohtang Pass and into Lahaul, now in Himachal Pradesh, where he collected seed.[2][1] The 1916 collections yielded no new species. Many seed gatherings were lost to grazing animals.[2]
Cannabis specimens
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh holds five sheets of Cannabis sativa collected under Cooper's name in Bhutan in 1914. Each is on a printed Flora of Bhutan label that carries the Bulley footer, and each is filled in by hand with a number, a locality, a date and an altitude.[7][8][9][10] Four labels name the district Timpu and one names Punakha. Dates range from 3 July to 8 August 1914, with one sheet dated 26 May 1914. Cooper wrote that his 1914 tour began in July.[3] One sheet, Cooper 1486 (1914), is annotated "Dwarf var. on sand by stream". All five are determined to species: Cannabis sativa L.[4]
The labels name Cooper as collector. The Lepcha collectors of his party, to whom he credited most of the harvest, searched the hillsides whenever the expedition halted.[3]
Accessions collected by Cooper:
| Collected | Locality | Elevation | Repository | Catalogue number | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cooper 3143 (1914) | Gichha | 2,438 m | Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh | E00150673 | |
| Cooper 1104 (1914) | Chukka | Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh | E00150670 | ||
| Cooper 1174 (1914) | Chukka | 1,372 m | Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh | E00150671 | |
| Cooper 1486 (1914) | Chalimarphé | 2,134 m | Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh | E00150672 | |
| Cooper 3352 (1914) | Timpu | 2,438 m | Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh | E00150674 |
The collections after the war
Cooper's collecting was cut short by the First World War. In a letter of February 1952 quoted by Elliott, Wright Smith wrote that the Bhutan collections had been sent to Calcutta when Cooper joined the army, had been stored in an outhouse of the herbarium and had been "eaten to bits by insects", and that what was reduced to powder was burnt. Some specimens, including the primulas, had reached Balfour in Edinburgh, and the remainder was sent to Edinburgh in 1924.[2] The archive holds correspondence about sending his specimens to the British Museum for determination, with lists of identifications dated January 1930.[1]
War and Burma
Cooper was commissioned in the Indian Army Reserve of Officers and served with Gurkha rifle regiments on the North West Frontier and then in Egypt until 1919.[2] In 1921 he was appointed superintendent of the Maymyo botanic garden, in the Shan uplands of Burma, and he later worked for the Agri-Horticultural Society of Burma in Rangoon.[1][2] He gathered a small number of specimens on Mount Victoria in southern Burma.[2] He returned to Scotland in the late 1920s so that his son could be educated there.[1]
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
From 1930 to 1934 Cooper was assistant to the Curator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, and in 1934 he became Curator, or head gardener, a post he held until his retirement in 1950.[1] He redeveloped the rock, peat and heath gardens and renovated the woodland garden.[2] His account of the Bhutan tours appeared in the garden's Notes in November 1933, and he published a further article, "Notes upon Bhutan in the Eastern Himalaya", in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society in February 1949.[3][1] In 1931–32 he gave ethnographic material to the National Museums of Scotland.[1]
He was a founder member of the Scottish Rock Garden Club, formed in July 1933, and later its vice-president.[1][2] He was a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Scottish Anthropological Society.[1] His son Billie, who served in the RAF volunteer reserve, was declared missing in action on 12 September 1942.[2] Cooper and his wife Emily retired to Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, and he died in 1962.[1]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 "The Roland Edgar Cooper (1890–1962) Collection" (PDF). RBGE Library and Archives. GB 235 REC. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 7 October 2026.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 Elliott, Alan (January 2013). "A founder member: Roland Edgar Cooper (1890–1962)" (PDF). The Rock Garden. No. 130. Scottish Rock Garden Club. pp. 17–29. ISSN 0265-5500.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 Cooper, Roland Edgar (November 1933). "Botanical tours in Bhutan, with special reference to the occurrence of the genus Primula". Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. 18 (87): 67–118. doi:10.24823/nrbge.1933.2381.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Herbarium specimen E00150672: Cannabis". RBGE Herbarium Catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 "Cooper, Rowland Edgar (1890–1962)". International Plant Names Index. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Harvard University Herbaria; Australian National Herbarium. Author ID 1790-1. Retrieved 7 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cooper, Rowland Edgar". Index of Botanists. Harvard University Herbaria. Botanist ID 74684. Retrieved 7 October 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Herbarium specimen E00150673: Cannabis". RBGE Herbarium Catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Herbarium specimen E00150670: Cannabis". RBGE Herbarium Catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Herbarium specimen E00150671: Cannabis". RBGE Herbarium Catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Herbarium specimen E00150674: Cannabis". RBGE Herbarium Catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 7 October 2026.