BRITAIN’s first rockery was established in the Chelsea Physic Garden in 1774, with lumps of lava from Iceland, downland flint and chalk and 40 tons of stone from the site of the Tower of London. Its imaginative creator is not remembered for it. Neither is he celebrated as superintendent of George III’s gardens at Kensington Palace and St James’s Palace, nor as a member of the huddle of botanists who, in 1804, formed what would become the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), nor even as the central figure in a controversy involving a disputed treatment for diseased trees and a government grant of £1,500 (about £235,000 at today’s value) to ensure a supply of healthy oaks for the Navy during the Napoleonic war. The payment infuriated other botanists, who subjected his reputation to intense scrutiny.
Instead, we unwittingly commemorate William Forsyth when the forsythia bursts into bloom, the flowers proving so impatient that they cannot wait for the leaves, and we know our flavescent year is truly in its stride. Yet Forsyth, Scottish-born botanist and author, revered in his early years as an orchard expert, had nothing to do with the shrub that bears his name. It was an 18th-century import. First spotted in Japan and recorded by Carl Peter Thunberg in his Flora Japonica of 1784, it was misidentified as a lilac and classified as Syringa suspensa. A member of the olive family and widespread in the Far East, it was prized in China, where its flowers, lian qiao—‘golden bells’—were deemed anti-inflammatory and fever-reducing.
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