An uncertain mandate

Young approved arrangements for an additional botanical garden at Vancouver’s Stanley Park “to provide object lessons for teachers” and gave permission for Davidson to send a letter to each school in BC regarding their cooperation in collecting plant specimens. The contribution of amateur collectors was an enormous opportunity for Davidson. Getting the project started, however, proved difficult because Davidson did not know when, or even if, the work of the Botanical Office would be transferred to the university.

Davidson’s plans for the plot of land in Stanley Park eventually fell through, but he still had the small area in the nursery at Essondale in Coquitlam. He had originally intended to use the land in Stanley Park for public education and the space in Coquitlam for experimental and nursery work. With the cancellation of plans for an arboretum at Stanley Park, Davidson limited his planting activities at Essondale to nursery work in preparation for the botany department at UBC.

Young did not indicate whether the Botanical Office would continue after the creation of a university botany department or whether the university would take over the smaller office. The uncertain legal status was troubling. Still, he gave Davidson permission to hire a “scientific assistant,” James A. Wattie, and an unnamed stenographer. Wattie, a former high-school botany teacher, classified species and assisted in herbarium and field work. (Wattie had also been a student in the arts botany class in Aberdeen when Davidson had been the assistant, so the two already knew each other.)

In the spring of 1914, Davidson hired a gardener to help in his botanical garden work at Essondale. I. van der Bom received $100 per month with “free house, fire, light, furnishings, vegetables and washing,” all provided by the patients at Essondale.