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... ha~ha~ha... what a curious little historical item !... Shades of Sussex at Simla etc! "Douglas, we will have to re-plant the herbacious border next year when the seeds arive !" The culture of the British 'memsahib' (while Alfred was off for 8 months of year running some silly province near Cawnpore) never ceases to both befuddle (to a modern mind) and delight !...

thanks a lot for the book

We owe much to Lord Warren Hastings for the estblishment of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens. It ranks among the foremost botanical gardens of the world and has some rare plants in it. (I think I saw a Welwitschia there, but not sure.) I saw these gardens about 50 years ago but then I heard that it is not safe to go there alone alone. The British did establish lovely gardens around the world: In Calcutta, in Candy, in Kew. Excellent job!

...The British have an innate love of landscape (especially their own! ~ hence the desire to recreate it wherever they wandered)....

Wherever they wandered, they lived in style. I have seen some of their colonial homes in hill stations lik Mussoorie and Naini Tal and the gardens attached to them. Just beautiful. There is something grand about living in style (but not extravagance).

... it was a sense of 'style' that many colonial Brits were unable to find when they returned home... books like the one above, as charming as they are, are also rather poignant... after 30 years of service in the 'mysterious east' many were strangers in their own land and felt great alienation in retirement...

In India...they found an opportunity to excel and in turn they found themselves...hence the longing and nostalgia for this land.

Yes ~ that is very true RBSI. I have talked now and then to Indians who fail to grasp how deeply many " Britishers" loved India ... afterall, many were born there (often into families that had served on the sub-continent for generations) and apart from a few years at school spent their entire working lives there... so in many ways these colonial types were a breed apart, not entirely British nor entirely 'Indian' ~ I don't think that is a state of mind that many people can appreciate today.

The British Civil Servant serving in India is probably one of the least appreciated and understood individuals in recent times. In the overtly patriotic and nationalistic climate...its difficult to understand how this lone, young and highly dedicated Officer...dispensed his multitudinous duties including administration and dispensing justice to a million subjects sometimes...under difficult circumstances. Seen dispassionately...it was these young men who gave the idea of India a kind of a cohesive structure during the disruptive and deteriorating phases of 18th and 19th centuries.

Another remarkable thing about the ICS was its size... never more than 1000 individuals (how many civil servants run India today??). These men were entrusted with enormous responsibilities: "Now here is Tom, in his thirty-first year, in charge of a population as numerous as that of England in the reign of Elizabeth ~ he rises at daybreak, and goes straight from his bed to the saddle. Then off he gallops across fields bright with dew to visit the scene of the late robbery; or to see with his own eyes whether the crops of the 'zemindar' who is so unpunctual with his assesment have really failed; or to watch with fond paternal care the progress of his pet embankment." ~ George Trevelyan, 'The Competition Wallah' ~ (1897)