A fitting tribute to an Angus town’s botanical heritage has been given planning permission.
A group of existing horticulturists have formed the Friends of the Forfar Botanists.
Now the green light has been given for a garden commemorating 18th/19th-century natural scientist George Don, his sons David and George Jr and the Drummond brothers of Inverarity, James and Thomas.
Eleanor Gledhill, chairman of the Friends of the Forfar Botanists, previously said it is a great pity evidence of their work persists around the globe to this day, but precious little of it in Forfar.
Members of Angus Council’s development standards committee met in Forfar and approved plans to revitalise an area of waste ground near the Myre car park.
The council-owned site, on which a boys’ club changing rooms once stood, has been empty for years. Planning officer Jamie Scott said there had been no objections or representations regarding the council-owned site.
He added: “It is an area of open land that has been vacant for some timeand the plans are certainly an improvement over what is there already.”
Forfar SNP councillor Lynne Devine welcomed the prospect of a new development.
“It’s a very interesting project by the Friends of the Forfar Botanists,” she said.
“These people are not well known in Forfar at the moment and they are world-renowned botanists.”
The Courier previously revealed local plans to turn waste ground in the town centre into a green space dedicated to their legacy in the 250th year since Don’s death.
The friends have received designs from gardening expert Inglis Thorburn. Forfar was put on the horticultural map by George Don and the Drummond brothers when plant cataloguing was still in its infancy.
George Sr was born in Menmuir in 1764 and died a pauper in Forfar aged 50. He became superintendent at Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens in 1802 and was elected an associate of the Linnean Society in 1803.
Other than a monument at East and Old Church cemetery and a plaque on the wall at Don Street (pictured), the site of his Doo Hillock nursery, not much in the way of tribute exists to the first man to systematically record plant life across Scotland.
Described as one of the first “plant adventurers”, he used a 15ft pole to hook precarious specimens from cliffs.
Some of Don’s dried plants are at Montrose Museum and the last surviving volume of his private herbarium is at the Department of Botany in Oxford.
His vasculum (plant box) is in the Meffan Institute, Forfar. George Sr’s sons to build on his work across the world included George Jr, David, Patrick Neill and James Edward Smith Don.
The younger Drummond brother, Thomas (1793-1835) worked at the Don nursery in Forfar, taking over in 1814. Taking part in Sir John Franklin’s second US land expedition of 1826, he left the group to explore the Rocky Mountains.
He fell ill in St Louis in 1831 but was able to go on a botanical tour of Texas before a bout of cholera and his death. James (17871863) was an early settler in Western Australia.