Botanical Art Gallery

713. View of Lake Wakatipe, New Zealand

New Zealand Flax (Phormniumn tenax, Forst.) in the foreground. This is the most useful plant in the islands. Half-a-pint of honey juice can be obtained from the flowers of a single plant ; a gum is exuded where the leaves are broken away from the ste

© RBG KEW

713, Art, Lake Wakatipe, Landscape, Marianne North, New Zealand, Painting, Phormium Tenax, Victorian

Adansonia digitata, Willd. (Baobab or Upside-down tree)

Watercolour on paper, no date (late 18th early 19th century). Hand painted copy of an illustration commissioned by William Roxburgh (1751-1815). In his Flora indica Roxburgh describes this plant as a tree which is very scarce in India, and probably not a native of Asia'. Roxburgh tells that in the Botanic Garden of Calcutta, where this tree blossoms in May and June, and ripens its seed in the cool season, there is a 25 years old plant of Adansonia digitata, with an irregular, short and sub-conical trunk, which is 18 feet in circumference. In a letter sent to Roxburgh the 2nd of July 1802, from Mantolle, in Sri Lanka, General Hay Macdowell notes: In my walk last night on the ruins of this once rich and extensive city, called by the natives Mande or Maddoo-ooltum, I chanced to observe a tree whose prodigious magnitude induced me to measure it...fifty feet in circumference, above six feet from the ground, the natives call it Peerig, and from what I have been able to collect, it is not indigenous here

© The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew