1. William Lobb was a British plant collector, employed by Veitch Nurseries of Exeter, who was responsible for introducing to commercial growers Britain Araucaria araucana from Chile and the massive Sequoiadendron giganteum from North America.
39 Facts About William Lobb
1. 2.
In 1837, William Lobb was engaged by Mr Stephen Davey of Redruth, where he helped establish a "thoroughly efficient" horticultural establishment.
3.
William Lobb gained a reputation as a keen amateur botanist and assembled a fine collection of dried specimens of British plants, particularly Cornish ferns, but had an increasing desire to travel abroad and to discover unknown "vegetation".
4.
William Lobb therefore booked him a passage on HM Packet Seagull, which was to set sail from Falmouth on 7 November 1840, bound for Rio de Janeiro and Lobb thus became the first of a long line of plant collectors to be sent out by the Veitch family to all corners of the world.
5.
Later in 1841, William Lobb travelled by boat to Argentina, where he spent the winter exploring the area around Buenos Aires.
6.
William Lobb then travelled overland to Chile via Mendoza and the Uspallata Pass over the Andes, thus avoiding the perilous sea voyage around Cape Horn.
7.
James Veitch's instructions to William Lobb included a request to locate and bring back seeds of the Chile pine which had originally been introduced to Britain by Archibald Menzies in 1795.
8.
Once William Lobb had recovered from the ordeal of his Andean crossing he left Valparaiso and travelled south by steamship to Concepcion from where he set off to the forests of the Araucania Region.
9.
William Lobb collected over 3,000 seeds by shooting cones from the trees while his porters gathered fallen nuts from the ground.
10.
William Lobb then returned to Valparaiso with the sacks containing the seeds and personally saw them onto a ship bound for England.
11.
Unknown to his employers, Lobb sent seeds back to his former employers, Sir Charles Lemon at Carclew and John Williams of Scorrier House, where a plantation of monkey-puzzle trees was grown.
12.
William Lobb then travelled by steamship to Talcahuano and then to Los Angeles, from where he went inland towards the mountains following the Laja River upstream to the Antuco volcano.
13.
William Lobb then followed the Andes to Santa Barbara regularly making excursions up to the snow line.
14.
William Lobb found this expedition exhausting and the eventual shipment back to England was disappointing with only one significant new discovery, a magenta flowering perennial Calandrinia umbellata.
15.
On leaving Puna, William Lobb hired mules and a guide and travelled inland to Quito and on into southwestern Colombia.
16.
William Lobb eventually reached the port of Tumaco, with a further collection of plants, from where he sailed for Panama intending to travel on with his latest finds back to England.
17.
William Lobb therefore despatched his latest collection from Panama and awaited instructions from Veitch.
18.
William Lobb was able to rescue some of the seeds, bulbs and dried specimens which he sent to Exeter.
19.
William Lobb reached Exeter with his plants on Saturday and is gone to his friends.
20.
William Lobb was familiar with the use and manufacture of gunpowder for mining, having grown up near the two gunpowder plants at Ponsanooth, Cornwall.
21.
The 1841 census shows that while William was in South America, his brother, Henry Lobb, was living at Cosawes Woods where he worked as a labourer.
22.
From a visit to Chiloe Island, William Lobb introduced Berberis darwinii which had been discovered in 1835 by Charles Darwin during the voyage of HMS Beagle.
23.
William Lobb's finds were despatched to England where they were grown in Veitch's Exeter nursery before being sold to eager gardeners.
24.
Amongst the plants sent back by Lobb were two species of Cantua which he found growing in Bolivia, Chile and the Peruvian Andes; C buxifolia which was the first to flower in May 1848 and the bushy C bicolor, with its large golden-red trumpet flowers.
25.
At the beginning of 1848, William Lobb arrived back in England and was re-united with his brother Thomas for the first time since setting off for Brazil in November 1840.
26.
William Lobb soon left the lawless port and set off in search of "horticultural gold" in Southern California.
27.
William Lobb spent the autumn of 1849 through to early 1851 in the Monterey area, including the Santa Lucia Mountains, where he soon found the striking Santa Lucia fir, later described by Hooker as "among the most remarkable of all true pines".
28.
The cones sent back by William Lobb were full of seed which were capable of being propagated by Veitch.
29.
In 1853, William Lobb was in San Francisco packing his collection of seeds to prepare them for shipment back to England when he received an invitation to a meeting of the newly formed California Academy of Sciences.
30.
William Lobb had been out chasing a large grizzly bear; the long, hard chase led Dowd into a strange part of the forested hills where he followed the bear into a grove of gigantic trees.
31.
William Lobb immediately realised the impact such a tree would have on British gardens and the importance that his employers would attach to being the first nursery to offer it for sale.
32.
William Lobb then returned to England on the first available boat arriving back in Exeter on 15 December 1853, a year earlier than expected.
33.
William Lobb had taken a gamble cutting short his contract, knowing that, at the risk of angering his employer, he had to get the seeds to England before anyone else could get back first.
34.
William Lobb seems taken with a sort of monomania, which it is difficult to describe and which he could not explain himself, a sort of excitability and want of confidence.
35.
William Lobb was unable to make any further new discoveries, but sent back consignments of plants and seeds from time to time until the end of 1856.
36.
On 3 May 1864, William Lobb died forgotten and alone at St Mary's Hospital in San Francisco.
37.
William Lobb had no mourners at his burial in a public plot in Lone Mountain cemetery.
38.
The old garden moss rose, 'William Lobb' was named after Lobb by its French breeder, Jean Laffay, in 1855.
39.
William Lobb is a character in Tracy Chevalier's novel At the Edge of the Orchard.