Naturalists, and especially botanists, are a strange breed. In Kew Gardens there is a well-known Victorian tropical plant collection and the largest tree in there is named after my great-grandfather, the Reverend William Williamson Newbould.

The tree is a genus of Bignoniacea, named Newbouldia, but my ancestor never set eyes on it. It is well known to the staff in the Palm House at Kew and, indeed, it is a bit of a favourite – especially in February each year when it flowers with long, purple, trumpet-shaped flowers. It is a beautiful and colourful plant and can be found in the tropical rain forests of Central Africa or South America – or in garden centres in Florida, USA.

William Newbould interests me, not just because I am descended from him, but because he and his great friend and collaborator Babington, were contemporaries of Darwin at the University of Cambridge and in the various scientific circles of the time. Looking at how they worked and how they did science then is a case of “what the Victorians did for us”.

Newbould’s interest in botany, dating from his time at a preparatory school near Doncaster, deepened when he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1838, the year after Queen Victoria took the throne. There he attended the lectures of Professor J. S. Henslow, and became friendly with Charles C. Babington and Frederick Townsend, who were to be among the leading field botanists of his generation. After graduating in 1842 he embarked on a series of plant-hunting trips to various parts of the British Isles, five of them with Babington. During these he consolidated his expertise as a taxonomist.

Babington, also known as “Beetle” Babington, because – like Darwin, he had an obsession for collecting beetles – was involved in a dispute with Darwin when both used the services of a beetle collector to provide them with samples for analysis. Clearly, it was a highly specialised role in nineteenth-century Cambridge! Darwin retained the services of “his” beetle collector and went on to other things, as we are celebrating this year.

Newbould and Babington collaborated for nearly half a century. There had been, since around 1845, a Cambridgeshire Naturalists’ Club of which John Stevens Henslow, the only senior man from whom Charles Darwin had got any encouragement and who was Professor of Botany till 1861, was a mainstay. To this Club, which seems to have been small and informal, Babington in his Journals constantly refers in regard to the meetings and expeditions organised by it and which he regularly attended, along with W. W. Newbould, then curate of Comberton, described as the “father of Huntingdonshire botany”.

Despite a growing family (eventually five sons and a daughter), he nevertheless refused at least one living on conscientious grounds and about 1860 resolved to take advantage of his private means to leave the service of the church and devote his days to his scholarly interests. He moved to London and thereafter spent almost all of each winter in the botanical department or reading room of the British Museum, where his lithe, spare figure was a familiar sight. In 1863 he was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society.

According to his biographer, D. E. Allen,

“Newbould now made a unique role for himself as a disseminator of early plant records to the increasingly numerous botanists who were compiling local or county floras. Every one of those issued in the years 1860–91 owed far more to his editorial and scholarly assistance than he allowed their authors to acknowledge; in the words of one of his obituarists, he was

‘the very incarnation of self-abnegation … nothing was to him a source of greater happiness than to place his time, his brains, his critical experience freely at the disposal of some younger man who seemed in need of them’ [Hillhouse].

Deeply averse to having anything published in his name, he insisted on disclaiming all responsibility for the fifth volume of the Supplement to English Botany, which was credited to him on the title-page. He was persuaded in his last years to allow his name to appear on the second edition of H. C. Watson's great compendium, Topographical Botany – on which he had bestowed much labour. The silent presence of a kind of all-pervading ghost was always more to his taste. Eighteen volumes of manuscript lists in the botany library of the Natural History Museum testify to his unwearying diligence, as did his herbarium, later incorporated in that museum’s general collection.”

Allen writes that, at one time, Newbould had contemplated taking up residence at Oxford, but was deterred by the inaccessibility of that university’s early herbaria, which were then housed in a loft reached only by a shaky ladder. In 1886 he was knocked down by a cab and died at Kew on 16 April, aged 67; he was buried in Fulham cemetery on 20 April. The number of obituaries that appeared, several of them of exceptional length, reflected a general wish that the scale of his anonymous services should at last be publicly acknowledged, and how widely he had been revered for his unfailing helpfulness.

Newbould’s altruism and diligence are typical of his time and continue the tradition set by Gilbert White, whose Natural History of Selborne was the evidence of a lifetime dedicated to understanding his environment and recording his observations for posterity. As further memorials, his name is borne by two species of blackberry and by the beautiful genus of Bignoniaceae, Newbouldia.

About the author

Dominic Newbould is Director of External Relations at OU Worldwide, the international division of The Open University. He lives and works in Milton Keynes, which is famous for its 4000 acres of parks and 20 million trees, although they do not include a Newbouldia.

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Just finished the fieldwork and breathing a sigh of relief after all the hectic rushing around the country surveying species rich meadows. The fields are mainly in the floodplains of the rivers Thames, Severn, and Derwent. We are looking at various aspects of these species rich communities which used to be a common sight but are now rare, for example what level of water and nutrients do they need/can they withstand. Floodplain meadows are of course subject to occasional flooding indeed they act as flood protection areas for cities such as Oxford, we know these high biodiversity plant communities can withstand a certain amount of winter flooding but what happens when the areas flood in summer when the plants are in full growth like happened in 2007?

The 1300 sample locations have to be surveyed over a short period when all the plants are up and flowering but before they are cut at the end of June. Besides the meadows that we have been recording annually for many years there were several ‘new’ floodplain areas that had not been looked at for 10 years and which proved to be a bit of a challenge. We wanted to record exactly the same 1x1 metre square areas (quadrats) that had been surveyed in the past so that we could see if there had been a change in species composition especially after the severe flooding and lack of hay cut that happened in 2007. The quadrats we record are not marked by anything – the areas are run over by hay cutting equipment and later grazed by animals so we can’t put in above ground sticks and filling each field full of buried metal to mark all 200 squares is not really desirable either. So how do we find them each year and how to rediscover the ones from 10 years ago?

Until this year we had been using theodolite type surveying equipment to accurately measure angles and distances from fixed points, these can position the quadrats to within a few mm if the fixed objects are still present and visible and we can find the ‘origin’ position of the survey. It’s a big ‘if’ when you consider that the origin position is usually a buried dipwell somewhere in the middle of thousands of square metres of waist high grass and that the landscape often changes quite considerably in 10 years. Fences are replaced, trees grow up and obscure reference points, the 10cmx10cm metal lids of the dipwells may be taken away so the metal detector might be of no help in finding them.

We are moving over to a gps based system, its not as accurate as the old system but can usually position the quadrats to within 5cm of where they should be which is fine and is usually significantly quicker as you don’t have to hunt for the fixed points and there is no delicate equipment to carefully set up on a heavy tripod. The gps also gives the locations in latitude/longitude or ordinance survey grid so researchers will be able to go back to those exact positions in future. There is still a bit of a downside to the new system, it may be lighter, quicker and can be one person operated but it does rely on the mobile phone system to get real time differential corrections of the gps signal – this is how it achieves a much better accuracy than a normal hand held gps. Some of our sites have rather poor and intermittent gprs mobile phone coverage which can be very frustrating as the accuracy can go from a couple of cm to a couple of metres and back again as you are walking along so we may even set up our own temporary base stations and use a radio link instead of using the mobile phone for these sites.

What are the results of all this effort by the botanical surveyors and of the chemical analysis of soil and hay, well you will have to wait until at least the autumn for all the data to be typed in and analysed. Just by eye some of the sites looked rather different to normal but this may have been more to do with the lack of a hay cut rather than the water from summer flood itself.

Botanical surveyors setting off to set up quadrats in a flooded meadow beside the Thames in 2008.
[image by Mike Dodd © copyright Mike Dodd]

Normally the meadows are dry at this time of year so it was interesting trying to identify species of grass under 30cm of river water at this site. The red box contains the ‘total station’ theodolite for comparison with gps at setting out quadrat locations.

About the author

Doctor Mike Dodd is a research fellow in ecology at the Open University. He is also a keen naturalist: "Nearly all biologists nowadays only study one organism or even just a few molecules, but I have a plea that people should be aware of their whole environment."

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Last week the work I came here to do began in earnest with me giving a three hour, non-stop, seminar of the principles underpinning the CLAMP method of obtaining ancient climate information from fossil leaves. CLAMP stands for Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program and was initially devised by my late post-doctoral mentor Jack A. Wolfe.

As a botany student at Imperial College in the early 1970s I had heard about Jack’s interest in the way that leaf form, particularly leaf margin architecture and size are related to the mean annual temperature and water availability in the place where they grow. Anxious to be involved in this research I elected to study under Jack when I obtained a LindemannPostdoctoral Fellowship. It also helped that Jack was based in California just south of San Francisco and, after all, this was in the wake of the “flower power” era.

My own research into the way that fossil leaf assemblages may, or may not, reliably reflect the vegetation from which they are derived had involved the use of, for that time, advanced multivariate statistics and computing. Jack, on the other hand was, well, not that way inclined. However over dinner we discussed the possibility of exploring whether or not more leaf features might carry more climate information.

In 1993, long after I returned to the UK, Jack published the first detailed account of CLAMP. In the intervening years he had doggedly set about sampling leaves from forests in different climate regimes and devising ways of mathematically describing the leaves in ways that captured climatic information. Subsequently we continued to develop and apply the technique until Jack’s death in 2005.

It is now clear that CLAMP is potentially a very powerful climate proxy and has been cross-calibrated with non-biological techniques such as oxygen isotope methods. However CLAMP in its current form is limited by the climate and type of modern vegetation used to calibrate it, being mostly based on observations in North America and Japan. More data are needed from sub-tropical and tropical forests and may even require a separate calibration for these types of climate altogether.

As we rattled along a dusty road to the Kukrail Forest site near Lucknow to take our first Indian CLAMP sample my colleague, Dr Rakesh Mehrotra, casually remarked that this was also a “crocodile reserve”. Suddenly my light-weight walking books that I had especially selected with ankle support to limit the damage done by insect or, at worst, snake bites, seemed woefully inadequate. After all I had not reckoned with invading the territory of large vertebrates with big mouths full of an indecent number of teeth.

Dr Rakesh Mehrotra and PhD student
Gaurav Srivastava collecting a
CLAMP sample in Kukrail Forest.
[Photo © copyright Bob Spicer]

The forest itself was tinder dry and at this point in the dry season many trees begin to shed their leaves. This is an ideal time to take a CLAMP sample as the leaves are mature and in a state where they would naturally be shed and perhaps enter the fossil record. I reassured myself that no respecting crocodile would appreciate such dryness.

 As we moved through the forest collecting all the observable different shapes and sizes of leaves from species after specie,s we eventually came to a small river where water buffalo were wallowing.  Surely no self-respecting buffalo would be doing such a thing if there were the slightest chance of being regarded as lunch…

As it happened we did see crocodiles, or more accurately Ghariyals (Ghavialis gangeticus) . The long-snouted crocodilians were once common in the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers, but there they were safely behind a wire fence in an area set aside for the breeding programme. Throughout the day we collected 29 species of tree, shrub and vine leaves and are now on our way to building up an Indian CLAMP calibration.

Preliminary analysis indicates that, with the existing calibration, CLAMP underestimates the temperature of the Lucknow area, just as we suspected it might. This is because many of the species in the Kukrail Forest, like the crocodiles, have teeth and toothed leaves are most often found in cooler climates. The difference between the CLAMP estimate 15.4±3.4°C and the measured mean annual temperature of 24°C is significant enough to justify continued sampling of forests in India to improve the technique.

About the author

Bob Spicer is Professor of Earth Sciences at the Open University. Founding Director of the OU's Centre for Earth, Planetary Space and Astronomical Research (CEPSAR) his interests are broad. However he is most at home when studying how plants can be used to tell us about ancient climates, and how that information can help us plan for managing our planet in the future.

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