200 years of McGill’s Botanical history inspires Montreal artists

Two-hundred years ago, a young man frequented swamps, stream banks and thickets, collecting wild plants across what would become the urban core of the city of Montreal. He had recently returned home from Edinburgh, where he had gone to be receive medical training, learning there also techniques of drying and preserving plant specimens, botany and medicine then being sister-subjects.

It was likely on his visits to friends and patients across the city that he did his collecting, often re-visiting the same spots on different dates, creating a catalog of flowers and fruits as they appeared through the seasons. Dr. Andrew Holmes would go on to help found Canada’s first medical school, the Montreal Medical Institution, which shortly after became the Faculty of Medicine in the freshly established McGill University.

Holmes donated his plants to the McGill University Herbarium on its founding, and these have been cherished and preserved ever since. Although the earth of Montreal now holds up the buildings and industry of a metropolis, thanks to Holmes’ botanical record, the spirit of these last days of wilderness can still be pictured. Two public art projects launching in Montreal this summer take inspiration from this collection; sharing a goal to resonate this glimpse of the past into the present and through to the future.

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