Henry Trimen

Henry Trimen belongs to the record of Ceylon less as a draughtsman than as the man who gathered the island’s plants into a single great illustrated work. He was born in London on 26 October 1843, trained first in medicine, taking his medical degree at the University of London in 1865, and turned early to botany, editing the Journal of Botany and serving in the botanical department of the British Museum before the appointment that carried him to Ceylon.

In 1879 he succeeded G. H. K. Thwaites as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Peradeniya, and he held the post until his death at Kandy in 1896. Over those years he rearranged and enlarged the gardens, travelled the island collecting, and set himself the task of describing its entire flowering flora. The result was A Hand-book to the Flora of Ceylon, published in London from 1893, of which he lived to complete the first three volumes; the fourth and fifth were finished from his materials by Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, and the whole ran to five volumes by 1900.

The work is remembered here for its atlas of a hundred plates, lithographed and then coloured by hand. The drawings behind them were made at Peradeniya by William de Alwis, the gardens’ own draughtsman, who had followed his father Harmanis de Alwis Seneviratne into the post; between them the two generations of the family produced thousands of botanical studies for the gardens across the nineteenth century. That the finest printed record of Ceylon’s plants was drawn by Ceylonese hands, and not by imported artists, gives the Flora of Ceylon a particular place in the island’s visual heritage.

The plates sit where botanical science, colonial history and Sri Lankan art meet. Drawn from life at the gardens and printed with scientific exactness, they remain among the most important botanical images of the island’s flora, and, published before 1900, they belong now to the public record. The Hand-book and its atlas are held in the great botanical libraries, and the original de Alwis drawings are kept at the Colombo Museum.