– Publicité –
250 YEARS AGO
Jean Nicolas Céré: Director of Pamplemousses Botanical Gardens
Raj Boodhoo
These times, we are witnessing ongoing debates on climate change and global warming, and on the need to activate afforestation, growing forests in new lands, and reforestation, restoring forests, which have been neglected or destroyed. The aim is restoring biodiversity by creating green spaces which absorb carbon. Governments and local communities in major industrialized states and in small island states have established several movements aiming at sustainable development. The mood, however, has been volatile and efforts to realize such projects often timid. If there is a consensus at COP30, to prevent deforestation of the Amazon forests, it has been difficult to deal with the other main objective: securing pledges by major industrialized states to cut down on fossil fuels.
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In this short article, we look back 250 years, at a time at the peak of Enlightenment, when considerable efforts were made, in spite of all odds, to transform the Pamplemousses Gardens into a laboratory to acclimatize ‘useful exotic plants’ with a view to increasing food production, and introducing plants which could have an economic importance. Created by Pierre Poivre in 1767, the garden became the main center of naturalization of food, medicinal, ornamental and forests plants drawn from India, China, Madagascar, Indonesia and the Pacific islands. Moreover, the most important contribution of this early garden of the French colonial empire has been – and this must be highlighted in all discourses on the world history of plant transfers from the East to the West – its groundbreaking role in plant distribution, not only to islands in the Indian Ocean but also to Guyana and the French islands of the Caribbean.
In March 1775, Céré was appointed director of the Pamplemousses Gardens, three years after the departure of Poivre. This brief story relates how until 1810, he assumed the responsibility of naturalizing cloves, nutmegs, breadfruits and several other plants and their distribution not only to the inhabitants of the colony but also to various gardens in the world, including the Jardin du Roi which became the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Schonbrunn Garden in Austria, or the botanical garden of Calcutta (Kolkata) and that of Guiana.
During the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), France lost its territories in Canada, the Caribbean islands and its trading posts in India, including the main one, Pondicherry. When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, France ceded its territories in Canada; however, its Indian comptoirs and Carribbean colonies were restored. The French East India Company, facing bankruptcy, restored the Mascarenes to the Crown. Pierre Poivre, who was appointed Ordonnateur–Général des Iles de France et Bourbon, was given a new chance to realize his ambition to convert Mauritius into a spice-producing colony, in order to break the Dutch monopoly of spice trade. The Ministre de la Marine, Choiseul, agreed, as he expected the trade of exotic products could pay administrative expenses of the colony. Poivre bought from the Compagnie des Indes, the Mon Plaisir garden, formerly belonging to Governor La Bourdonnais, and started introducing exotic plants from different continents. Two expeditions were sent at government expenses to the Moluccas to fetch spice plants. However, the colonial government was quite unsettled, as Poivre had difficulties with the first two governors to further his plan. Even, the new Ministre de la Marine, De Boynes, had another agenda, as he ordered the transfer of cloves and other spice plants, together with cultivation instructions, to Guiana. Plants were despatched in 1773-1774 and in the 1780s. When he was recalled from his post, Poivre sold the gardens to the crown and left the island in October 1772.
Nicolas Céré was baptized in Port Louis in 1738. He studied in France. Appointed lieutenant de vaisseau, he campaigned in India during the war. He decided to settle on his father’s property in the district of Pamplemousses, and was appointed Commandant de Quartier. His father, Toussaint Céré, had arrived in the colony at around 1728. Appointed ‘pilote du port,’ he resided at Port Bourbon (Grand Port), before he became a cultivator at Flacq, where he left behind his name to a river. He later obtained a land concession at Pamplemousses, close to the garden and set up Habitation Belle Eau. Céré established close relations with Poivre, who was then setting up the garden, and developed a passion for botany. However, after the departure of the latter, Céré was barred from entering the garden by the new administration. Maillart Dumesle, the successor of Poivre, did not show much interest in spice plant cultivation at Pamplemousses. Before his appointment in Ile de France, he had been Commissaire Ordonnateur of Guiana, and he, therefore, favoured the idea of establishing spice plantation in the Caribbean. It was argued that the climate of Guiana was more favorable to the cultivation of spice plants.
The isolation of Céré ended only when Sartine, the new Ministre de la Marine (1774-1780) ordered the government to appoint him as director of the garden in 1775. Thus, the Jardin des Pamplemousses resumed its course to become the supreme collector and the main distributor of economically useful plants of the French colonial empire. More lands at the garden were cleared, nurseries and seedbeds were established. Céré learned how to cultivate plants, observe their growth, describe them and send memoirs to be presented at the Académie des Sciences, Paris. He exchanged views with experienced local cultivators like Joseph Francois Charpentier de Cossigny, who had a flourishing domain at Palma in the Plaines Wilhems district, or Joseph Hubert in Bourbon (Reunion island) and Philibert Commerson, botanist of the Bougainville expedition. He corresponded not only with scientists at the Jardin du Roi in Paris but also with those in foreign countries like the Philippines, Batavia and India. Nurturing exotics was not an easy task. He had to deal with extreme climate, droughts and cyclones, insects and lack of funds and labour. Eminent scientists like Stadtman and Petit Thouars helped him in his tasks in the later years. His efforts, however, had promising results, as in 1776, acclimatized plants produced the first cloves, and two years later, in 1778, the first nutmegs were gathered. A ceremony was held on that occasion, attended by the Governor La Brillane and other dignitaries, and the event, held to be groundbreaking, was reported in the local and French press. Governor La Brillane is supposed to have brought a sample of the fruits to be presented to Louis XVI.
The 1780s witnessed several despatches of plants, together with instructions as to their cultivation, to the Jardin du Roi in Paris and French colonies. The garden achieved international fame and inspired other European governments to set up experimental gardens in their colonies. Joseph Banks, the director of Kew Gardens suggested that the garden at St Vincent island be converted into an acclimatizing nursery for plant propagation in the British West Indies. Through Ile de France, botanical events on both sides of the world were therefore connected.
The outstanding efforts of Céré were rewarded by the Société d’Agriculture in Paris as he was awarded a gold medal in 1788. People of Guiana were so grateful, according to Nemours, the biographer of Poivre, that they placed the bust of Céré in their botanical garden. (Dupont Nemours, 1788). Historians, local and foreign, have written on spice plants and trade. M. Ly-Tio-Fane‘s books, Mauritius and the spice trade (1958), The triumph of Jean Nicolas Céré (1970), including that of Rouillard/Guého, Le Jardin des Pamplemousses (1983) are pioneering works on the subject. Recently, historians have been focusing on new aspects of exotic botany and the role of indigenous people of India, China and other countries, in the construction of knowledge on plants and their contribution to the works published by European scholars. Historians have also stressed the interest of Pierre Poivre in the preservation of forestlands of Ile de France; the laws that were passed during his administration are held to be among the first environmental regulations in the whole colonial world.
Céré passed away in 1810, a few months before British take-over, but his legacy endures.
The last years of the XVIIIth century were marked by political upheavals in Europe. Colonies too were undergoing economic transformations. In Ile de France, the cultivation of exotic products, spices, cotton and indigo were on the decline, while that of sugar cane was on the rise. During early British administration, creolized clove seedlings were despatched from Mauritius to countries, like Zanzibar. Other places in the West Indies became important producers of spices and other exotic products. During the 19th century, Mauritius focused on sugar production, large scale deforestation took place in order to plant cane, build roads and sugar factories, camps to house thousands of workers from India. Environmental regulations of Poivre were long forgotten.
After several years of neglect during the first half of XIXth century, the gardens of Poivre and Céré bloomed again, under the able administration of James Duncan and John Horne, and the collaboration of scientists of Kew Gardens, England.
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