It's 5 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in Mid-November, and I'm waiting outside the entrance to Chiang Mai Botanic Garden, Northern Thailand. I'm with two colleagues from the Garden, Aek and Metee, and we're about to go collecting plants. Our destination is Doi Chiang Dao mountain some 50km to the north, and our transport is the Botanic Garden Jeep. Our driver is late.
I'd spent the first six weeks of this trip to Thailand collecting plants for my PhD research, from the Three Pagodas Pass on the western border with Myanmar (Burma) over to the Mekong river on the eastern border with Laos and Cambodia. Coming to Chiang Mai, however, was something special - for here, as well as looking for plants, I was also looking for a person - Arthur Kerr. "Dr Ka", as he is known locally, founded the national herbarium in Bangkok and is regarded as the father of Thai botany.
Kerr was born in Kinlough Co Leitrim in February 1877, and, though his family moved to the south of England when he was a young man, he was awarded a medical scholarship to study at Trinity College Dublin and remained in Ireland. Before graduating from medicine, he also took honours in botany and, as things turned out, it was botany which would become his true calling.
Ship's doctor
Kerr first arrived in Thailand soon after graduation. He had taken a trip to Australia as a ship's doctor in 1901 and then accepted a medical position in Bangkok which had been arranged through his friend and botanical mentor at Trinity, Professor Henry Dixon. Later, he moved north to Chiang Mai.
At the time Kerr first arrived in Chiang Mai it was reached only by river or by caravan over the mountains, and the isolation and natural beauty of the area drew him more and more to the unique flora which surrounded him. In his time as a doctor he collected all around Chiang Mai province on elephant-back and on foot. Indeed, Chiang Mai was probably his favourite place in all Thailand, for when he was eventually appointed Government Botanist after 15 years of amateur plant collecting, he chose Chiang Mai as his base. The holy mountain, Doi Soothep, held a special attraction for him, and he even built a hut on the mountainside to aid his plant collecting there.
But Kerr was determined to complete a study of the entire kingdom, and he organised more than a dozen trips all the regions. One such expedition into the heart of central Thailand had 40 carrier men, six scientific assistants and numerous elephants. It lasted over six months.
As we stood in the morning darkness not far from where Kerr had built his hut on Doi Soothep, the thought of a six-month collecting expedition seemed a little ambitious to us. We didn't even have a car. However, just as the three of us began to worry whether he would come at all, our driver sped up the dust road towards us, all smiles.
Pride of place
In Kerr's time it would have taken two days to get to Doi Chiang Dao village, but we made it in just over an hour. We stopped for breakfast at a restaurant in the village. On the walls were pictures of Thailand's Royalty and important local monks. Pride of place went to King Rama V, Thailand's most revered monarch and the subject of the film, The King and I.
Earlier this century, when Asia was being carved up by the European powers, Rama V played France and Britain off against one another in an attempt to keep Thailand independent. In this, as in most things, he succeeded. He used this independence wisely and set about transforming the feudal country he had inherited into the modern state it is today. A major pillar of this change was a new civil service, and it was at this point that Kerr entered the story.
He was, by this time, much respected both as a biologist and as an expert on Thai farming. He was also an able manager and when the Royal Palace offered him the position of Director General of the new Department of Agriculture, he accepted it. It remains one of the highest ever postings for a ferang, or European, in the history of Thailand.
Fitting legacy
Kerr was fluent in Thai as well as several regional dialects. Though his handwriting was almost illegible to his colleagues (he suffered tuberculosis in his right elbow as a boy) he was the first European to Latinise many of the names of the places he visited. He also sent many living orchids to Glasnevin, as well as furnishing Trinity College (and numerous other European institutions) with a huge collection of Thai plant specimens - a fitting legacy of the greatest Asian field botanist of his age.
And here was I, setting out to follow just one of his collecting days. After breakfast, we spent the morning collecting plants on the lower slopes of Doi Chiang Dao and then headed up to a hilltribe village which had been there in Kerr's time. After some 10km, however, the road had become impassible. A further 3 hours struggling up the hillside got us nowhere and we had to call it a day. Had we been on elephant-back, as Kerr had been, only a sheer cliff would have stopped us.
Disappointed, we squatted down on the roadside and shared some sticky rice and spiced chicken. On the floodplain below we looked at clusters of farmer's huts scattered among the rice paddies. Nearby, a water buffalo and her calf lolled about in their muddy plunge-pool, escaping the stifling afternoon heat. Kerr probably encountered the same scene in his day as I was looking at - only that Irishman was the first scientist to realise what treasures were to be found in this glorious kingdom.