Phylogeography

In the subsequent 20 years as the garden’s director, Maiden seized every opportunity to improve the herbarium. Even internationally destructive events such as World War I provided unexpected additions: one soldier alone donated 300 specimens from Palestine. And a further parcel from Kew revealed 58 acacia and 23 eucalypt specimens collected between 1816 and 1839. Maiden was also occupied by several enormous scholarly projects: there was work on acacias, a project on the country’s earliest botanical collectors, a forest flora for New South Wales and a complete critical revision of the genus Eucalyptus. Eucalypts fascinated him. He once described them as ‘wild, untamed things, like the native bears and opossums which frequent their branches’. After his retirement, Maiden continued corresponding, working on eucalypts, and writing articles. But within a decade of his death in 1925, a combination of economic depression and waning interest in taxonomy led to a decline in the status of the herbarium. But later years saw something of a revival which this book hopes firmly to cement.