Roland Edgar Cooper
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| 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)
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| 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. He worked for A. K. Bulley of Ness in Cheshire, for whom he collected plants and seed.[1][2] 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] Five of his 1914 Bhutan sheets are Cannabis sativa and are held in Edinburgh.
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] The International Plant Names Index and the Harvard University Herbaria index of botanists give Rowland Edgar Cooper for the same dates.[4][5] The standard author abbreviation is R.E.Cooper.[4]
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] Alan Elliott writes that Cooper was sixteen when the guardianship began.[2]
In 1907 he went to Calcutta with Smith, who had become keeper of the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Garden there. Elliott writes that Cooper studied botany and horticulture in Calcutta and later at the Lloyd Botanic Garden in Darjeeling under the garden's curator George Thomas Lane, and accompanied Smith on collecting trips to Sikkim and the borders of Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet.[2] The Edinburgh archive says he collected specimens in Sikkim, Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan during these years.[1] In 1910 he returned to Scotland with Smith and took the horticultural course at Edinburgh. Elliott adds that he had intended to farm fruit 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] Elliott writes that the commission was an expedition to Sikkim sponsored by Bulley, undertaken with the encouragement of Smith and Balfour, and that its main purpose was to introduce garden plants, with botanical collecting secondary.[2] The printed label on his Bhutan sheets reads "R. E. Cooper, Collector for A. K. Bulley, Esq., Cheshire."[6] 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. Elliott reports that about 500 seed collections reached Edinburgh through Bulley, many of which neither germinated nor persisted, and that the trip was judged a failure in terms of new garden plants. His main 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]
Elliott counts a Bhutan collection of 3,958 numbers, including 42 species of Rhododendron and 51 of Primula, and states that 63 of the collections served to describe new species or varieties, 32 of them still recognised.[2] Among the plants Cooper named with Balfour were Primula eburnea and Rhododendron rhabdotum.[3] Elliott notes that the Bhutan material was 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, where he collected seed. Elliott notes that the 1916 collections yielded no new species and that many seed gatherings were lost to grazing animals.[2] The region is now part of Himachal Pradesh. The map legend quoted above names Kulu and Lahaol.[1]
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.[6] The labels write the district "Timpu" and, for one sheet, "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"; the label gives no varietal name.[7]
The following specimens have accession pages on this wiki:
| 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 |
Cooper's 1933 account of the Bhutan tours concentrates on Primula and does not mention Cannabis. The labels name him collector; the same paper says that the party's Lepcha collectors searched the hillsides whenever the expedition halted.[3] The sheets therefore show who led the collecting and who held the numbered series, and they do not show which member of the party gathered each plant.
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] Elliott credits him with redeveloping the rock, peat and heath gardens and renovating 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] Edinburgh's archive lists his fellowships 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 "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 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 "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.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Herbarium specimen E00150673: Cannabis". RBGE Herbarium Catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Herbarium specimen E00150672: Cannabis". RBGE Herbarium Catalogue. Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Retrieved 4 October 2026.