Indian Botanic Garden, Kolkata

Who Founded the Garden, and Why?

• The garden sits in Shibpur, Howrah, near Kolkata, on the west bank of the Hooghly River.
• Lieutenant Colonel Robert Kyd, of the British East India Company, founded it in 1787. He proposed it a year earlier, in 1786.
• Kyd’s plan was mainly commercial: growing teak, spices, and tea. Collecting rare plants was not the original aim.
• William Roxburgh became superintendent in 1793. He expanded the garden’s scientific scope and built an extensive herbarium.
• The garden covers 109 hectares, about 270 acres, today, and holds over 12,000 plant specimens.
• It is managed by the Botanical Survey of India, under India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests.
• It was renamed the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden on 25 June 2009. That honoured the physicist and plant physiologist.

Was the Garden Only About Commerce?

• Kyd’s original proposal wasn’t purely economic. It also answered a famine gripping British-controlled India at the time.
• Kyd hoped the garden could help introduce famine-resistant food crops for wider cultivation across Bengal.
• Kyd initially picked a 310-acre site, larger than the garden’s current 270-acre area. Urban and industrial expansion around Howrah gradually ate into that original land.
• Roxburgh’s herbarium eventually grew into the Central National Herbarium of the Botanical Survey of India. It now holds about 2.5 million specimens.
• Roxburgh is widely regarded as the “Father of Indian Botany.” He commissioned life-sized botanical paintings by skilled local Indian artists, made during the pre-photographic era.
• These became known as the “Roxburgh Icons”: 3,169 paintings and 476 pencil sketches, using natural dyes on specially imported paper.
• Many of the original Indian artists went uncredited for decades. Later administrations began crediting them properly wherever records allowed.

How Does a Tree Lose Its Trunk and Survive?

• The Great Banyan Tree, Ficus benghalensis, is believed to be at least 250 years old.
• Its original single trunk was destroyed by two cyclones and a fungal infection. It was removed in 1925, to protect the rest of the tree.
• Without a main trunk, the tree now spreads through thousands of aerial roots. It looks more like a forest than a single tree.
• Its crown now has a circumference of about 486 metres, held up by roughly 3,772 aerial prop roots reaching the ground.
• A 330-metre road was built around the tree, but its canopy has kept spreading past it.

What Else Does the Garden Hold, and What Threats Does It Face?

• The garden also holds a large collection of palms, orchids, and a giant water lily pond.
• Cyclone Amphan, on 20 May 2020, damaged part of the Great Banyan and uprooted around 1,000 other trees across the garden.
• Sewage-filled canals, encroaching illegal settlements, and a persistent funding crunch also threaten the wider garden’s rare specimens today.
• A wider colonial thread: the garden’s early economic mission connects to India’s wider colonial plantation history. Assam and the Nilgiris were both later forced into large-scale tea cultivation, building on plants first grown here.
• A naming pattern: naming the garden after a working scientist echoes other Indian institutions honouring pioneering researchers, like Birbal Sahni, founder of Indian palaeobotany.

What’s the Latest Project at the Herbarium?

A large-scale project is digitising nearly 20 lakh herbarium specimens at the garden’s Central National Herbarium, a collaboration between BSI and the NGO Mukti.

• The project began in October 2025, targeting completion by the end of 2026.
• Two of the herbarium’s seven halls were fully digitised as of the latest report.
• The project also covers the “Roxburgh Icons,” the 3,169 life-sized botanical paintings made by local Indian artists during the pre-photographic era.