Traveller in a vanished landscape

David Douglas, the most extraordinary and most prolifically successful Botanist of all time travelled between 1823 and 1834 all over the North American continent on behalf of the Royal Horticultural Society of London. His name is perhaps best remembered for the “Douglas fir”, the greatest tree in lumber, but among hundreds of other discoveries are California poppies, lupins, evening primroses, and the only peony to be found in the Western Hemisphere. His passion for plants led him to forsake his native Scotland for the wilelt differing worlds of sophisticated London, provincial New York, pastoral California, and the primitive American northwest. He shot the rapids of the Columbia River, braved the onrushing grizzly bears and Indian arrows, climbed peaks in the Rockies, fell in love with a Chinook Princess, and finally, when only thirty-five, found death in mystifying circumstances in a cattle-pit in Hawaii. His importance in botanical terms is self-evident, but his story also speaks directly to that part of the reading public that enjoys a good adventure story – which in effect Douglas’s life was – set against a now vanished landscape of a pristine and unpolluted continent.