Sidmouth Museum and the Sid Valley Biodiversity Group have been working together on an exciting new interactive display highlighting Sidmouth’s natural history.
They have been tracking records of the local wild flowers from Victorian amateur botanists through to the Biodiversity Group’s recent survey carried out across the valley in 2021.
The display will feature lots of modern pictures of the valley’s most picturesque wild flowers, and resources from the museum’s extensive local archive. It will be linked to a new SVA book, Sidmouth’s Wild Flower Year by local amateur naturalist Ed Dolphin.
One mystery that needed solving was the origins of the flower list of local Victorian eccentric, Peter Orlando Hutchinson, the man who bought the stone from the old parish church to build Chancel House between the Bowls and Rugby Clubs. Hutchinson left many books and diaries on local history and geology.
In the 1980s, local amateur naturalist Bob Hodgson came across a copy of a third edition of Hutchinson’s Guide to Sidmouth and the Neighbourhood which had an appendix that listed over 600 local plants. Bob and his friends set out find as many as they could, and they found more than 400 still living in the area. Bob’s work was celebrated by Mary Munslow Jones’ book One Man and His Wild Flowers, written for the SVA after Bob’s death in 1988, and so was Hutchinson because it appeared that he had compiled the list on his regular country walks. The puzzle was that he made very few mentions of wild flowers in his very detailed diaries and the Appendix was only in the Third Edition.
The Biodiversity Group had been given a different Victorian book, Flora Sidostiensis, in which local doctor W H Cullen also listed over 600 local plants. The 2021 survey found more than three hundred of Cullen’s species.
When researching for the Museum display, Hutchinson’s plant list and Bob Hodgson’s notebooks couldn’t be located in the archives. Finally, Museum Archivist Liz Owen found the relevant copy of Hutchinson’s Guide and passed it to the Museum Curator, Ann Tanner, who was shocked to discover that the Guide’s publisher had just lifted the whole of Cullen’s plant list and included it as an appendix to Hutchinson’s book with no mention of the original author. Whether Hutchinson knew what had been done, we will never know. Perhaps the plant list was appended to only the Third Edition of the Guide and, when he found out, Hutchinson had it removed from later editions.
The one remaining puzzle is the whereabouts of Bob Hodgson’s notebooks which are somewhere in the archive. I am sure Bob would have been disappointed to find that the list had been ‘borrowed’, but it was still a genuine list of the local plants from Victorian times.
The new, interactive display and the book will be available when the museum opens for the summer season on Friday 25th March.
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