Dr. Luke Keogh

OK, so these plants could grow.

The ship travelled through all these different regions, all these different climatic zones, so through the cold, then across the equator through quite warm and humid and then back down to Australia.

Stopped at Tasmania and then finally the ship arrived in Sydney and this box of plants was taken off the ship and taken up to the Botanic Gardens in Sydney and then the curator there was able to open the box and see

a whole resplendent, thriving group of plants that had come all the way from London.

Ward's good friend who ran a nursery at Hackney.

George Loddages is their, let's say, co-collaborator with Ward.

And why Loddages is important, he comes from a long line of...

nursery owners.

His father, Conrad Lottages, set up the nursery at Hackney, and it was considered one of, if not the most important exotic nursery firms in Europe.

And so from the Hackney nursery, they were sending out plants to all different locations throughout Europe.

A lot of the exotic nursery trade was going through that.

So within about five years, there's over 500 have been put into circulation.

Lottage's nursery firm is very well connected throughout the globe, whether it's Botanic Gardens in India, Australia, Jamaica.

Knowledge of this technology is traveling through all of these networks.

Other people start to cotton on to this idea and then it goes from there.

No, he was a pious man.

He was also very giving.

And there's letters near his end in 1868 where he says, you know, many plantations have been set up with the use of my cases.

The government has profited greatly from the use of these cases, but I've never really received anything.

is tea and so in the 1840s the british really wanted to have their own tea plantations they sent a chap by the name of robert fortune who went to china to understand the tea industry and also to acquire tea plants to then be taken back to india where where the british had imperial control and so then they could have their own plantations and control the supply from there