History
Colonel Robert Kyd – an amateur botanist and Secretary to the Board in the Military Department of Fort William who also owned a private garden in Shalimar on Howrah side of River Hooghly proposed the concept of a Botanic Garden in Calcutta area in order to conserve the area’s native plants to Governor-General Sir John Macpherson – a Scottish administrator in India and the acting Governor General of India from 1785 to 1786. The Court of Directors of the East India Company was presented with this proposal by Sir John Macpherson which got approved on 31 July 1787, and laid the foundations of Calcutta Botanical. Apart from conservation of the native plant kingdom, Colonel Kyd’s interest was also in identifying new plants of commercial value for both Bengali locals as well the East India Company to trade - such as teak, coffee, tea, cinnamon, sandalwood, indigo, tobacco and Dacca cotton.
The unique landscape design of the garden was initiated by Sir George King in 1872 and is considered to be one of the best in the botanic gardens of the world with undulated land surfaces, artificial lakes and moats interconnected with underground pipes receiving water from the River Hooghly. The garden was known as East India Company’s Garden or the ‘Company Bagan’ or Calcutta Garden and later as the Royal Botanic Garden until Independence of India, after which it was renamed as the ‘INDIAN BOTANIC GARDEN’ in 1950. It came under the management of the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) on January 1, 1963.
On 25 June 2009, Calcutta Botanic Garden was renamed ‘Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden’ in honour of West Bengal’s great polymath, botanist, biologist, physicist and archaeologist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937), who was knighted by the British Honors System.
Read more about this topic: Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden
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