Talk:Roland Edgar Cooper
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Forename: Roland or Rowland
- Roland: Cooper's own byline in Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 18(87), November 1933, which the journal's metadata and the printed title page give as "Roland Edgar Cooper"; the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh archive (GB 235 REC) and its authority entry; the Edinburgh herbarium catalogue, whose collector field for the five Bhutan sheets reads "Cooper, Roland Edgar"; Elliott 2013. Bionomia and Wikidata list "Roland Edgar Cooper" as an alias.
- Rowland: IPNI author 1790-1, which lists the abbreviation as taken from Meikle; Harvard University Herbaria botanist 74684 (variant name "Rowland Edgar Cooper"); Wikidata Q21509018 and Bionomia 52024, whose primary label is "Rowland Edgar Cooper".
- No civil registration (birth entry, Kingston upon Thames, 1890) was consulted. The article uses Roland and states the split.
Two Harvard entries
Harvard's index holds a second entry, "Cooper, R. E." (botanist 13262, collector 1913–1916; Bhutan, India, Myanmar), beside the "Rowland Edgar" entry. The sources consulted do not say whether the two are one person. The dates, regions and number of the entry fit the subject of this article, but the identification is not stated by Harvard.
Date on Cooper 3143
The label of Cooper 3143 (1914) is dated 26/5/14 and the catalogue gives 26 May 1914. Cooper's 1933 account says the 1914 tour "started in July" and does not describe an earlier Bhutan journey in 1914. His collection numbers rise through the 1914 season (No. 1104 on 3 July, 1486 on 11 July, 3352 on 8 August); 3143 would fall between the last two if numbered in order. The article states the label date and Cooper's own statement side by side and does not choose between them.
Cooper's account and the cannabis sheets
The 1933 paper (pp. 67–118) was searched in full text for Cannabis, hemp, ganja and bhang and for dwarf plants other than Primula and Rhododendron. It names none of these in connection with cannabis. The search was made on an OCR text of the journal's PDF. The archive catalogue also lists "Notes on Environment of Plants of Seed Numbers, Gathered in Bhutan, 1914" (REC/2/1), and his field books, plant-determination notebooks and itinerary (REC/1/1), none of which has been read. Whether they mention the 1914 cannabis gatherings is unknown.
The labels name Cooper as collector, and the 1933 paper credits most of the gathering on the tours to his Lepcha collectors. Which member of the party gathered each cannabis plant is not recorded.
Unconsulted works
- D. G. Long, "The Bhutanese itineraries of William Griffith and R. E. Cooper", Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 37(2): 355–368 (1979), cited by the Edinburgh archive for Cooper's itineraries.
- Cooper, "Notes upon Bhutan in the Eastern Himalaya", Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 74(2), February 1949.
- Cooper, "Story of a Flower", Blackwood's Magazine, March 1929, cited in the 1933 paper.
- Royal Society of Edinburgh Year Book 1962 (obituary).
- Cooper's Edinburgh notebooks and diary (REC/1/1/1 to REC/1/1/4).
Portrait
Edinburgh's archive holds a photograph of Cooper taken about 1913–1916. Its licence was not found, so it is not used. The lead image is the digitised Cooper 1486 sheet.