Darjeeling Ferns.: Mounted by Mrs. P. Jaffrey, Darjeeling.

Darjeeling, West Bengal: , 1882. A very fine herbarium with expansive additional samples A superb and uncommon hortus siccus of ferns from West Bengal, compiled and mounted by Phoebe Jaffrey, wife of Andrew Thomas Jaffrey, the founding curator in 1878 of the Lloyd Botanic Gardens in Darjeeling. This copy has been copiously expanded by a later British amateur botanist, with a huge number of samples added both within and without. The samples in Jaffrey's herbarium are captioned as "British Sikkim", a region with one of the most diverse floras in India, and especially rich in ferns. While living in India, Phoebe Jaffrey created botanical albums for sale, usually of large folio size, mounted with excellent specimens of local ferns. She sold the albums singly, and in sets of two or three, those such as this dating from 1882 with her label at the rear. The album provides a fruitful example of the roles taken up by colonial wives in India in the documentation and possession of the natural world. Andrew Jaffrey "was one of a number of Scottish gardeners selected by Balfour for service in India, initially for the Agri-Horticultural Society of Madras, but who ended up in Darjeeling from where he sent a series of fine specimens of the various flora" (Jeffrey). While Andrew was testing the India flora for its suitability for mass-farming and sending specimens back to Britain for assimilation into botanical collections, Phoebe was supporting this process by collecting and commodifying the plant-life in a domestic manner. Both actions were key, "over the course of the nineteenth century, to the domestication of 'exotic' species" and the "transplantation and rooting of imperial imaginations at home. The growth of commodity consumption during the nineteenth century reflected and reproduced imperial imaginations on a national scale onto the household" (Blunt, p. 53). The flower press in the suitcase is inscribed in ink with the name of one Betty Jefferys, who collected an impressive number of samples in British woods in the 1920s. Motivated by the example of Jaffrey she has made and documented her own expansive explorations in the world of botany. Surviving examples of Jaffrey's albums are notably uncommon; while WorldCat locates just a single copy (at Harvard's Botany Libraries), the University of St Andrews has a collection of three such volumes, and their catalogue notes that the "University of Dundee Museums, National Botanical Garden of Ireland in Glasnevin, and Natural History Museum, London also have volumes of ferns by Jaffrey". We have located only one other copy in commerce, from the library of Elizabeth E. Hawkins, and have ourselves sold a single copy; by our count, there are just ten copies traceable worldwide. Folio. Original blue half morocco, blue cloth boards, title in gilt to front board. A large number of laid-in plant samples, including numerous mosses and grasses. A large brown leather suitcase containing 481 further loose sheets with mounted samples, 261 of these housed in early 20th-century wooden board flower press with blue belt. With 50 Darjeeling ferns mounted singly on recto, mostly full-page, each labelled in manuscript with the genus, species, and patria, a single example dated 1882. Darjeeling Ferns: ownership inscription of one Horace A. Wilcock on front pastedown. Wilcock (c.1889-1956) was commissioned into the Indian Army during World War One, where he was based in Deoli and Bangalore and did not see active service. It was possibly then that he picked up an interest in Indian botany. Extremities rubbed, wear to spine ends, boards bowing due to additional inserted material, mottling to cloth, remnants of label to rear cover, faint damp marks to margins of contents, a better than good copy. Laid-in samples: faint soiling to edges, samples generally well-preserved. Suitcase: wear to extremities, lining lifting a little, occasional pencil marks, loose samples presenting nicely. Alison Mary Blunt, Travelling, Home, and Empire: British Women in India, 1857-1939, University of British Columbia, 1997; Andrea DiNoto, David L. Winter, The Pressed Plant: The Art of Botanical Specimens, Nature Prints, and Sun Prints, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1999; Roger Jeffrey, India in Edinburgh: 1750s to the Present, Routledge, 2020.