William Lobb

Lobb took with him seeds of the early Rhododendron hybrid "Cornish Early Red" (R. arboreum x R. ponticum) as a gift from Veitch to the new emperor of Brazil, Pedro II. The seeds were planted in the gardens of the Imperial Palace at Petrópolis where they are still growing today.[11]

Following his arrival at Rio de Janeiro, Lobb spent 1841 exploring the Serra dos Órgãos (Organ Mountains)[7] to the north-east of the port where he discovered several orchids including the swan orchid, Cycnoches pentadactylon, as well as Begonia coccinea and Passiflora actinia.[9] His first shipment of discoveries, which arrived at Topsham dock in March 1841,[12] also included a new species of Alstroemeria, an Oncidium, O. curtum (with yellow flowers and cinnamon-brown markings), and a new red Salvia. There were also several species of the beautiful pink-flowered climber Mandevilla, including M. splendens, which would become highly sought after for cultivation in England, and the small shrub Hindsia violacea, with its clusters of ultramarine flowers, which quickly became popular in Victorian greenhouses.[12] The next shipment arrived at Topsham in May but had been delayed at Rio de Janeiro and, as a result, many of the plants failed to survive the journey, arriving dead or "vegetated".[12]

Later in 1841, Lobb travelled by boat to Argentina, where he spent the winter exploring the area around Buenos Aires. In January 1842, he sent back five cases of plants, seeds and dried specimens, but unfortunately the ship was unable to dock at Exeter as expected and continued on to Leith in Scotland, from where the packages eventually reached Exeter.[13]

Lobb then travelled overland to Chile via Mendoza and the Uspallata Pass over the Andes, thus avoiding the perilous sea voyage around Cape Horn.[9] Lobb found the journey through the mountains gruelling, having to travel through snow that he described as "five feet deep, frozen so hard that the mules made no impression and the cold was intense",[13] causing him to collapse ill with fever on several occasions.

Desfontainia spinosa

James Veitch's instructions to Lobb included a request to locate and bring back seeds of the Chile pine (more popularly known as the monkey-puzzle tree) (Araucaria araucana) which had originally been introduced to Britain by Archibald Menzies in 1795.[10] Veitch had seen a young specimen at Kew Gardens grown from seed brought back by the Horticultural Society's collector James McRae in 1826, and was convinced that this tree would be hugely popular as an ornamental plant.[10]

Once Lobb had recovered from the ordeal of his Andean crossing he left Valparaíso and travelled south by steamship to Concepción from where he set off to the forests of the Araucanía Region.[13] At 5,250 feet, he reached his destination where the sought-after Araucaria araucana was growing on the exposed ridges below the snow-capped volcanic peaks of the southern Andes.[14] Lobb collected over 3,000 seeds[2] by shooting cones from the trees while his porters gathered fallen nuts from the ground.[13][14] Lobb then returned to Valparaíso with the sacks containing the seeds and personally saw them onto a ship bound for England.[13] The shipment arrived safely at Exeter and by 1843 Veitch was offering seedlings for sale at £10 per 100.[13][14]

Unknown to his employers, Lobb also sent seeds back to his former employers, Sir Charles Lemon at Carclew and John Williams of Scorrier House,[15] where a plantation of monkey-puzzle trees was grown.[16]

During 1842, Lobb collected from the Valparaíso area and sent back seeds of a purple nasturtium climber, Tropaeolum azureum, which he located at "Cuesta Dormeda, about sixteen leagues (50 miles) from Valparaíso".[13] He also sent the pale-blue mallow, Abutilon vitifolium, and the white, rosemary–scented Calceolaria alba, which was the forerunner of many Calceolarias which were to become popular as summer bedding plants.[13]

Lobb then travelled by steamship to Talcahuano and then to Los Ángeles, from where he went inland towards the mountains following the Laja River upstream to the Antuco volcano. He then followed the Andes to Santa Bárbara regularly making excursions up to the snow line.[17] Lobb found this expedition exhausting and the eventual shipment back to England was disappointing with only one significant new discovery, a magenta flowering perennial Calandrinia umbellata.[17]

Lobb's travels then continued through northern Chile, where he discovered Desfontainia spinosa,[18] before moving on through Peru to Ecuador.

En route, he collected the passion flower, Passiflora mollissima (now P. tripartita var. mollissima), which became popular in greenhouses,[19] and the delicate Calceolaria amplexicaulis.[18]

In the spring of 1843, he took four cases of plants, which he had collected on the slopes of the Peruvian Andes, by sea to the Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil. While he was there, an epidemic of yellow fever broke out and, along with other European residents, he was forced to move to Puná Island until the epidemic was over, leaving his cases with a shipping agent to send to England.[20] On leaving Puná, Lobb hired mules and a guide and travelled inland to Quito and on into southwestern Colombia.[20]

He eventually reached the port of Tumaco, with a further collection of plants, from where he sailed for Panama intending to travel on with his latest finds back to England. On arriving at Panama City however, he received news from James Veitch that the cases of plants left in Guayaquil had never arrived. Lobb therefore despatched his latest collection from Panama (which arrived safely at Exeter) and awaited instructions from Veitch.[20]

Amongst the shipments from Panama were several orchids including Oncidium ampliatum collected near Panama City, described by Veitch in a letter to Hooker as arriving "quite fresh but others are rotten",[20] a blue-azure Clitoria and a Lobelia, Centropogon coccineus, which he found growing "in shady places on the banks of the Chagres River"[20] as well as seeds of several Fuchsias and Tropaeolum.

While waiting in Panama, Lobb continued to seek out new plants despite suffering from an attack of dysentery. Once he had recovered, he returned to Guayaquil where he discovered all his cases rotting in a corner of a warehouse, with much of the contents destroyed by ants. The agent explained that the cases had "quite escaped his notice".[20] Lobb was able to rescue some of the seeds, bulbs and dried specimens which he sent to Exeter. Veitch replied by sending back a supply of glass to make new shipping cases and insisting that Lobb endeavour to replace everything that was lost.[20]

Despite being exhausted from his travels and repeated attacks of ill health, Lobb returned to the interior of Peru for a further four months, finally arriving back in England in May 1844.[20] On Lobb's return to Exeter, Veitch wrote to Hooker:

I was disappointed at hearing William Lobb had left Peru, but pleased to hear of his safe arrival in England with many plants and seeds in good order. He reached Exeter with his plants on Saturday and is now gone to his friends.[20]

Amongst the dried samples sent back to England was one of Solanum lobbianum which was sent to Kew Gardens where it was labelled as "Lobb Columbia". It was named after its discoverer by Georg Bitter (1873–1927), the German expert on Solanum, based on the single specimen at Kew. For a long time there was some doubt about the actual location of the plant's discovery until it was re-discovered in Ecuador by an American expedition in the 1990s.[4]

It has been suggested that it was William Lobb who in 1844 brought the knowledge that gunpowder could be made with sodium nitrate from Peru to Cornwall, in England.[22] Until then, gunpowder in Britain and the rest of Europe had been made only with potassium nitrate.

On his travels Lobb would undoubtedly have met and talked to his fellow Cornishmen living in Peru/Chile and employed by the mines. There were significant numbers there.[23] Lobb was familiar with the use and manufacture of gunpowder for mining, having grown up near the two gunpowder plants at Ponsanooth, Cornwall.[24] Also, as a professional gardener, he would have known about sodium nitrate, which was widely used as a fertilizer in Britain at that time.

The 1841 census shows that while William was in South America, his brother, Henry Lobb, was living at Cosawes Woods (a local gunpowder plant) where he worked as a labourer.[25] Another brother, James Lobb, lived at nearby Perranwharf. He worked as a cooper.

Within two years of William's return, two additional plants had been built in Devon/Cornwall to make blasting powder. These were at Herodsfoot, Cornwall and at Powdermills on Dartmoor. Sodium nitrate was suitable for blasting powder, which was used in the mines and quarries of the region.[26] The sodium nitrate as received from Peru was of sufficient purity to be used without further treatment. This accounts for the absence at these two plants of the usual facilities for upgrading the potassium nitrate that came from India, which had a purity of only 65-70%. The manufacturing know-how probably came from the Perran Foundry. Barclay Fox, the owner of the Perran Foundry, certainly had some commercial interest in the second plant and a connection through the Quakers to the owners of the first.[27]

The 1851 census shows that fortune smiled on the Lobb family in the years after 1846.[28] Henry Lobb became the manager of the Herodsfoot plant and had a 1/6 share in the venture.[29] His brother-in-law and former neighbour, James Martin, became the manager of Dartmoor Powdermills; James Lobb was appointed its agent and, by 1861, its manager.

Was some sort of deal struck? Because of his background as a 'local', William Lobb would have had access to the right people at Perran Foundry, giving him the opportunity to pass on his valuable information about Peruvian gunpowder. The advancement of his brothers could have been William Lobb's reward.

In 1853, Lobb was in San Francisco packing his collection of seeds to prepare them for shipment back to England when he received an invitation to a meeting of the newly formed California Academy of Science.[42] At the meeting, Dr Albert Kellogg (the academy's founder and a keen amateur botanist) introduced a hunter named Augustus T. Dowd who had brought to him a story of a "Big Tree".[41] Dowd told the audience that in the spring of 1852 he was employed as a hunter by the Union Water Company, of Murphy's Camp, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Calaveras County, to supply the workmen, who were engaged in the construction of a canal, with fresh meat. He had been out chasing a large grizzly bear; the long, hard chase led Dowd into a strange part of the forested hills where he followed the bear into a grove of gigantic trees. Dowd soon lost interest in the chase and wandered around in amazement at the sheer size of the trees surrounding him. On returning to his camp, Dowd told his story to his companions, most of whom did not believe him and accused him of being drunk; a week later, however, he was able to persuade some of the less sceptical to be led to the grove, where they were equally astonished by the monstrous trees.[41][43]

Biddulph Grange Wellingtonia Walk

Lobb immediately realised the impact such a tree would have on British gardens and the importance that his employers would attach to being the first nursery to offer it for sale.[41][42] After the meeting, he quickly headed to Calaveras Grove where he had the good luck to find a recently fallen tree, which he measured as "about 300 feet in length, 29 feet 2 inches, at 5 feet above the ground...".[43] In his notebooks, Lobb recorded: "From 80 to 90 trees exist all within circuit of a mile, from 250ft. to 320ft. in height, 10–12ft. in diameter."[44] He collected as many seeds, cones, vegetative shoots and seedlings as he could carry back to San Francisco, including two small living trees.[42] He then returned to England on the first available boat arriving back in Exeter on 15 December 1853,[45] a year earlier than expected. Lobb had taken a gamble cutting short his contract, knowing that, at the risk of angering his employer, he had to get the seeds to England before anyone else could get back first. The gamble paid off as Veitch was delighted, abandoning all other projects to concentrate on raising the seedlings in commercial quantities.[42] According to Hortus Veitchii, the two sapling trees "survived but three or four years, nor was there at any time much hope of their living."[38]

On Christmas Eve 1853, an editorial in The Gardeners' Chronicle announced that Veitch & Son "had received branches and cones of a remarkable tree from their collector in California, William Lobb" who had described it as "the monarch of the Californian forest".[42] James Veitch had immediately given specimens of the giant tree to John Lindley, professor of botany at the University of London and invited him to name the tree. In the Gardeners' Chronicle article, Lindley named the species Wellingtonia gigantea as a memorial to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington who had died in September the previous year.[42] The "giant amongst trees" was considered an appropriate memorial for such an important British historical figure.[43]

Six months later, the Chronicle reported that Veitch was offering seedlings of the tree at 2 guineas each or 12 guineas a dozen.[44] Lobb could not claim to be first to introduce the tree to Britain, as a Scot, John Matthew,[46] had taken some seed to Scotland four months earlier although he only distributed the seed among a few friends.[42]

The Victorians fell in love with the tree in much the same way as they had with the monkey-puzzle tree a few years earlier,[2] using it as a specimen tree and often planting it to form avenues,[44] including James Bateman who planted an avenue at Biddulph Grange, alternating Wellingtonia with monkey-puzzle trees.[42] There is a good example of the tree in the garden of the manager's house at the gunpowder plant in Herodsfoot, Cornwall, where William's brother, Henry Lobb, lived for many years.

Unfortunately, the name Wellingtonia gigantea was invalid under the botanical code as the name Wellingtonia had already been used earlier for another unrelated plant (Wellingtonia arnottiana in the family Sabiaceae).[45] Eventually in 1939, after several attempts to find an acceptable name, the tree was given the name Sequoiadendron giganteum by John Buchholz.[45] In Britain, however, the tree remains known popularly as "Wellingtonia".[42]