“I got Murray to put me ashore at Havre, and there posted over to Kew, saw Sir Joseph Hooker, so as to enable him to dispatch a night goods-train to meet the ship Amazonas on arrival at the Liverpool docks.
“June, 1876, was a time of commotion at Kew, as they were compelled to turn out orchid and propagating houses for service, and to make room for the sudden and all-unexpected inroad of the Hevea; but Sir Joseph was not a little pleased. The Hevea did not fail to respond to the care I had bestowed on them. A fortnight afterwards the glass-houses at Kew afforded (to me) a pretty sight—tier upon tier—rows of young Hevea plants, 7,000 and odd of them.”*
* “On the Plantation, Cultivation, and Curing of Para Indian Rubber,” by H. A. Wickham (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co.).
[CHAPTER XII]
HISTORIC DEVELOPMENTS
When the Para seedlings were ready to be transplanted into the open, India could not afford to adopt them. So the majority of them were sent to Ceylon, and small batches to Burma, Java, and Singapore. The West Indies, too, were given a few to experiment with, but the seeds had been obtained specially for the purpose of introducing Para rubber into the East, so naturally the seedlings were nearly all distributed throughout the Eastern Tropics.
Most of the seedlings that went to Ceylon were planted in the Botanic Gardens at Heneratgoda, near Colombo, which were specially opened in the low-country region as an experimental centre of rubber cultivation. A few of them, however, were given a home in the island’s world-famous Gardens at Peradeniya, in the up-country neighbourhood of Kandy. The plants at Heneratgoda flowered for the first time in 1881, at the age of five; those at Peradeniya did not flower until 1884.
(1) CEARA RUBBER TREE IN CEYLON. [Page 64]