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John
Ralfs Penzance Botanist By
Jan Ruhrmund. This
article was published in the West Briton newspaper on 18th December 1986, as part of
the Nature Scene in Cornwall series. For many people the opportunity to transform their hobby into a life’s
work would be considered a remarkable stroke of good fortune. However,
for John Ralfs distinguished 19th Century botanist the freedom to pursue his botanical interests was facilitated by
considerable misfortune. Born in 1807, the son of a Hampshire yeoman, Ralfs was
a frail child, and illness was to dog him throughout the 83 years of his
life. A brief but very promising medical career was finished by the
suspicion of incipient tuberculosis and, like many invalids of the time,
he was directed to the South-West to recover. He lighted upon Torquay,
but a brief and unhappy marriage provoked another move. In the autumn of
1837 John Ralfs chose Penzance as his new home, and remained there for
the rest of his life. He had developed an enthusiasm for the non-flowering
plants in particular, and at last he had a chance to study the mosses,
lichens. fungi and seaweeds of West Cornwall. The subject of his first
botanical paper was Alana
esculenta. a large edible
brown seaweed which he found growing at St. Michael’s Mount. It is a
northern species, and although never common in Cornwall, its increase in
recent years reflects a general lowering of temperature. Uncharted territory attracted Ralfs. and he is most
remembered for founding the study of Desmids, microscopic freshwater
Algae which lack the flinty skeleton of Diatoms, which also interested
him. Ralfs’s monograph of the “British Desmidieae”
appeared in 1848, “one of the finest scientific works that has ever
been issued from the press”. His painstaking research had raised the
number of known British species from a meagre six to nearly 200
and firmly placed the Desmids in the plant world; it had been
thought they were animals. Illness was to impede his work on Diatoms, but not
before he had stimulated others to take up this obscure study, one of
his contributions being the discovery of a species previously known only
from Brazil. growing in moss on trees at Penzance. Failing eyesight
forced an end to microscopical research. Ralfs turned his attention to
the Fungi, recording over 700 species in West Cornwall, many new to
Britain. Many years were spent compiling an exhaustive “Flora
of West Cornwall”, the manuscript volumes of which he presented to his
beloved Penzance Library in the Morrab Gardens; sadly, this remains
unpublished. The “Flora” gives a hint that Ralfs was not a committed
evolutionist, despite corresponding with Darwin! He criticizes the botanists of the day for their
tendency to sub-division, so that even the trivial variety is considered
important because it may be the ancestor of a future species. Superficially, Ralfs appeared a grave, unapproachable
man as he strode around Penwith with his swallow-tailed coat often
dripping with pond water. Although shy his friends, especially children,
knew him to be a genial conversationalist and patient teacher. He readily invited people into his naturalist’s den,
where he sat in a haze of tobacco smoke, surrounded by plant specimens.
Considered less praiseworthy today was his habit of introducing alien
plants, such as the Large-flowered Butterwort. to the Penzance district. His distinction was such that John Stuart Mill, the
philosopher and political economist, visited him they walked towards the
Land’s End, Ralfs oblivious of his companion’s identity until a
visiting card was “unearthed” days later. In tribute, a contemporary wrote that, with good health, “John Ralfs would have ranked as one of the greatest botanists of the century”.
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