Many beautiful orchids were sent home by business men residing in South America; for instance, William Cattley of Barnet, who died in 1832, and whose name is commemorated by the noble Cattleya, established an extensive correspondence with business men living abroad for the purposes of obtaining new and rare orchids, and through his efforts came many fine specimens, chiefly from Brazil. The earliest Brazilian Cattleya to reach Europe was C. Loddigesii, 1815, but the most famous and most protean species of all C. Cabiata, reached Europe in 1818, and others of the same genus came in rapid succession from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Argentine. Many beautiful Brazilian orchids were sent by William Harrison, a merchant living in Rio de Janeiro during the thirties and forties of last century, to his brother Richard in Liverpool, whose residence at Aigburth was in those days a Mecca to which orchid lovers paid annual pilgrimages.
To introduce these plants was one thing; to cultivate them successfully was quite another. Hooker once declared that for more than half a century England was “the grave of tropical orchids” and that those surviving did so in spite of, rather than on account of, the treatment they received. Each grower had his special system, mostly wrong: it was not until after repeated and costly failures that orchid importing and growing became a success, and that success only became general about 1850.
The debt of other countries to Brazil and indeed all tropical America for ferns and cacti is also great. The Canna and its ally Marcanta may be traced in England as far back as 1730; the Begonias and the Gesnera date from 1816–18, whilst the favourite Abutilon, introduced in 1837, is today hardy in many parts of Europe. The Gloxinia, arriving from South America a century earlier, has developed possibilities undreamt-of by earlier horticulturists, and the same may be said of the Fuchsia, brought from Mexico and Chile, 1823–25. The most popular South American shrub is the Escallonia macrantha, introduced from the island of Chiloe (Alexander Selkirk’s retreat) in 1848; it has for many years been a favourite hedge plant in the county of Cornwall, where it thrives in pink profusion.
On the Madeira River, Amazonas; rapids at Tres Irmãos.
Victoria Regia lilies near Manáos.
The Calceolaria is another early nineteenth century alien from South America; so too is the Dahlia: sixty years ago whole nurseries were given over to the culture and hybridization of this flower, and an entire literature appeared on the subject. Its popularity has somewhat waned, but on the other hand the most gorgeous of greenhouse climbers, Bignonia, was never more treasured than it is today. Brazil, and other adjacent countries, has given us also many species of such genera as Achimenes, Alstromeria, Anthurium, Aristolochia, Caladium, Calathea, Hibiscus, Iponoea (the Evening Primrose), and hundreds of other beautiful plants.
Among plants introduced and cultivated abroad for other reasons than their loveliness are the pineapple (Anana sativa) which reached Europe as early as 1690; coconuts were carried from Brazil a century ago; and the Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa), which was probably first taken to Portugal by very early navigators, finds its first mention in England in the 1830 edition of Lindley’s Natural System of Botany; he speaks of the “Souari ... or Brazil nuts of the shop, the kernel of which is one of the most delicious fruits of the nut kind.”
Brazil’s gifts to the pharmacopeias of the world have also been very valuable. Discovery, or rather publication in Europe of the medicinal properties of many Brazilian plants is due to Piso, author with Marcgrav (“een geboren Duitscher”) of the work De Medicina Brasiliensi, etc., of 1648, already mentioned. This monumental publication was undertaken under the patronage of Count John Maurice of Nassau, Governor of North Brazil during the period of Dutch occupation, a far-seeing man whose portraits are to be seen in the public galleries of Amsterdam and Brussels. Nearly all the Brazilian plants with notable medicinal properties are fully described and illustrated in this book: among them, and perhaps the best known, is Ipecacuanha, obtained from the root of Cephalis ipecacuanha, native to the damp shady forests of Brazil. This drug was first mentioned in an account of Brazil given by a Portuguese friar in Purchas’s Pilgrimes, 1625, where it is called Ipecaya, so that it is clear that Piso, although the first to bring the drug to the notice of European medical men, was not the discoverer of its qualities. In England the famous physician John Pechey was the first savant to bring ipecacuanha to general notice in his Observations made upon the Brasilian root called Ipepocoanha, issued in 1682; a few years later it was firmly established in European medicine. In 1686, says A. C. Wootton (Chronicles of Pharmacy, 1910) Louis XIV bought from Jean Adrien Helvetius the secret of a medicine with which a number of remarkable cures had been performed; Helvetius, whose patronymic was Schweitzer, was the son of a Dutch quack, and he not only made his own fortune out of ipecacuanha (the royal gift alone was a thousand louis d’or) but got the appointment of Inspector General of the hospitals of Flanders and court physician to the Duke of Orleans.
Another famous drug from Brazil is the Balsam of Capevi (or Copaiba—Copaiva), the sap of Copaifera officinalis, a genus of the leguminous order of plants; it was described by Piso; is mentioned in Edward Cooke’s Voyage to the South Sea and round the World, published in 1712, and first made its appearance in English gardens in 1774, having previously figured in Jacquin’s Stirpium Americanarum Historia, 1763.
Jaborandi, obtained from the dried leaflets of Pilocarpus pennatifolius, was described by Piso and Marcgrav: like the two mentioned above, this drug was well known to the native tribes of Brazil and employed by the pagés or medicine men; it received its first serious notice in recent times in the Diccionario de Medicina published by Dr. T. J. H. Langgard in Rio de Janeiro in 1865. The plant reached English gardens three years later, but its properties do not seem to have been recognized in Europe until 1874, when a Brazilian scientist, Dr. Coutinho, sent some leaves to M. Rabutau, the eminent pharmacist of Paris, who tested it and declared it to be as valuable as quinine as a febrifuge and sudorific.