Queer transplanting from the Himalayas to Yorkshire: Reginald Farrer’s loves for men and alpine plants (1880–1920)

Abstract

The death at the age of forty of the prominent writer and plant hunter Reginald Farrer in 1920 was not simply of concern to his own family and the botanical community. 1 Gardening was a passion shared by huge numbers of British people ensuring that books such as Farrer's My Rock-Garden (1908) were widely read and admired. Plant hunters were also popular celebrities whose exploits were celebrated as evidence of British scientific endeavour and physical endurance. He is remembered today for having done much to popularize the cultivation of alpine plants, but his life and work had a wider cultural significance than was apprehended even in the days of his fame.Farrer was not intent on simply studying and collecting botanical specimens from the Alps and the Himalayas. He was also in love with the plants whom he termed 'the perverse little people of the hills' . 2 As indicated by the title of another of his books, Among the Hills: A Book of Joy in High Places (1911), it was only amongst such 'children of the hills' that he felt emotionally fulfilled. 3 Farrer regularly anthropomorphized the objects of his passion. Talking as other imperial Englishmen might have done of an admired human tribe, he labelled saxifrages as a 'glorious race' . Of Saxifraga lilacina (lilac alpine saxifrage), to give just one example, Farrer recorded that 'this year he bloomed in character, and I have never in all my life seen a more exquisite creature' . 4 That he thought of these plants as children on the cusp of puberty can be deduced from his remark on male and female flowers that a floral Romeo 'can fertilize Juliet and cause her to conceive' . 5 Such adolescent loveliness could bring on a state of ecstasy which implicitly had sexual overtones, as when Farrer confides in his readers that 'I grow stark drunk on the scent of the Cluster-Narcissus. It gives me a pleasure so sharp and deep as almost to be wicked, and an agony' . 6 The nearest Farrer came to publicly declaring his love was for the plants that he anthropomorphized and addressed as male. One such was an elusive plant called Eritrichium nanum (alpine forget-me-not). Will he find him again, Farrer wondered, amongst the mist and scree? ' Ah, Eritrichium is near! Down, beating heart!… How the minutes pulse agonizingly by, growing into a sort of abscess of suspense, to break in 4 Queer transplanting from the Himalayas to Yorkshire: Reginald Farrer's loves for men and alpine plants (1880-1920) Dominic Janes 9781350143722_txt_prf.