Henry Noltie’s ‘Flora Indica: Recovering Lost Stories from Kew’s Indian Drawings’ | These flowers have a backstory

Deep in the Kew Gardens archive some years ago, Henry Noltie found a drawing that had been cut in half. It was a large watercolour of a salak palm (S alacca zalacca ). He didn’t think he’d ever find the other half, but months later, it turned up mounted on a herbarium sheet in a specimen cupboard, where it lay unidentified. More indifference than inefficiency — for what could be the value of anonymous “company-style” paintings of plants from the Indian subcontinent from 200 years ago? A lot for someone like Noltie, who is pleased that some “wonderful paper conservators have been able to rejoin Humpty Dumpty”, as he refers to the two halves. Days before the launch of his book Flora Indica: Recovering Lost Stories from Kew’s Indian Drawings (Roli Books, ₹2,495) in Delhi, he remembers the last few years that he has (in the words of William Dalrymple, who has written the foreword) “spent sleuthing in the dusty, dark cupboards” of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.