Interest in plants has always remained high in colonial Madras. Many of the early European surgeons in Madras were interested in plants mainly because of their potential medicinal values. Samuel Browne, a Madras surgeon in the Fort St George Hospital in the 17th Century, was the first to document plants of Madras ‘city’. He sent seeds of different plants from Madras to England.

Browne, cooperating with the London apothecary-botanist-entomologist James Petiver, published his list of Madras plants under the title ‘An account of part of a collection of curious plants and drugs, lately given to the Royal Society by the East India Company’ in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1700–1701 (Vol. 22, pages 579-594). Plants listed in the Browne-Petiver article have been referred to by either their vernacular names or using a system before Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735), which streamlined plant nomenclature.

A vague reference exists that another surgeon, Edward Bulkeley (a contemporary of Browne?) in Fort St George Hospital, maintained a garden near the Fort in the 1700s. Bulkeley is also credited with exploring southern Indian plants, but we know nothing further about his work in Madras.

Another notable name is Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Draakenstein (1636-1691), the Dutch Governor of Malabar, who authored Hortus Malabaricus (Flora of Malabar) in 1674-1675.

Johann Gerhard König, who came to Tranquebar as a Halle missionary (1768) collected plants in southern India, and even set up a small botanical garden there. König was trained by Carl Linnaeus and, therefore, followed the Linnaean system of plant nomenclature.

William Roxburgh, a Madras surgeon and botanist, on his posting in Samulcottah (Godavari plains, 450 km north of Madras), set up an experimental garden in Samulcottah in 1785, which included plants of economic importance, such as indigo (a dye-yielding plant), pepper (a cash crop), breadfruit (used as a vegetable), and sugarcane.

James Anderson, a surgeon in the Madras Medical Establishment, pursued plants with great interest. He set up a nopalry in Marmelong (Mambalam, now in Saidapet) in 1789 to rear cochineal insects (scale insects). Nopal is the Spanish name of the Mexican prickly pear (a cactus). Nopalry is a garden of cacti intended to raise the carmine-dye-yielding cochineal insects. The nopalry was closed and the cacti were moved to Bangalore’s Lal Bagh in 1800. James Anderson also maintained a private garden in Nungambakkam, where Anderson’s Gardens – a house, and not the garden he established – is today. Andrew Berry, also a surgeon and a nephew of James Anderson, supervised the Marmelong nopalry. 

The Madras Agri-Horticultural Society (MAHS) was founded in 1835 by Scottish surgeon-botanist Robert Wight, 20 years after William Carey founded the Agri-Horticultural Society in Calcutta. MAHS then had a vast acreage, which got later divided with the laying of Cathedral Road. Exquisite native trees of peninsular India, such as Nauclea and Garcinia, besides a few native orchids, such as Vanda roxburghii, were maintained here.

My Ladye’s Garden, a part of People’s Park (far behind Victoria Public Hall), used to be a place of absolute delight. I remember going to My Ladye’s Garden as a schoolboy. What I recall clearly is the 1.5–2 m tall floral clock, which was working till the 1980s. Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras, established My Ladye’s Garden in 1859 (Note: Charles Trevelyan’s son George Otto Trevelyan was the biographer of Thomas Babington Macaulay, a controversial administrator of colonial India). This site held flower shows each year in February, which continued till the mid-1980s. I hope that with restoration the annual flower show will return. Talking of public parks (gardens), I remember going to Independence Day Park in Nungambakkam as a university student just to see an unusual cactus Pereskia. 

Other similar public facilities in the Presidency were Lal Bagh (Bangalore) founded by Hyder Ali, ruler of Mysore, in 1760 and developed to its present shape by Hugh Cleghorn in 1856. The Government Garden in Ootacamund, established by W.G.  McIvor in 1847, and the Sim’s Park (I do not know who established this park, but it has been named after J.D. Sim, Secretary of the Madras Club) in Coonoor are other botanical delights which, fortunately, continue to provide viewing pleasure and enlightenment to the people of not only Tamil Nadu, but also those from other parts of India.