Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Champ HB" data-source="post: 28340753" data-attributes="member: 427286">Marianne North ලංකාවෙ හිටපු ටිකේ මොකද කරේ කියලා විස්තර ටිකක් හම්බුනා.Pearls, Spices and Green Gold -An Illustrated History of Biodiversity Exploration in Sri Lanka by Rohan Pethiyagodaමේ පොතේ 81-85 පිටු ටිකේ තියෙන්නෙ මෙයා ගැන....MARIANNE NORTH[ATTACH=full]189377[/ATTACH]Photo Courtesy of Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK.Born in Hastings, England, on 24 October, 1830, Marianne North was the daughter of a wealthy Sussex landowner and member of parliament, a relative of Frederick North (1766-1827), who was from 1798-1805 the British governor of Sri Lanka. As was the custom of the time, Marianne received only a basic education, but even in her early years showed a predilection for watercolour painting. When her mother died in 1855, Marianne took seriously to flower painting, an occupation she enjoyed also on tours of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa she undertook with her father. Marianne was devastated by her father's death in 1869. Bestowed with ample means, she sold her house in Hastings and took full time to botanical oil painting, to which medium she had transferred a few years previously. She then began a series of overseas tours in search of plants and flowers to paint. Having started in Sicily, she later went to North America, Brazil and Japan (via the Pacific). En route to England, she stopped in Sarawak (where she discovered and painted the largest known pitcher plant, subsequently named Nep enthes northiana in her honour) and Singapore, and then made her way to Sri Lanka.Strangely for a Victorian woman, North was confortable travelling independently to foreign lands, occasionally with a companion but often alone, making no secret of the fact that she pre- ferred the company of "less civilized" people. Her family background was such, however, that she was usually able to secure letters of introduction to influential people in the countries she visited, which must have made her tours safer, if not merely more convenient. So it was also when Amazon, the ship on which she arrived in "a good cabin but with unpleasant people", docked at Galle in 1876. She stayed initially for a week at the Grand Oriental Hotel, venturing out on sightseeing tours each morning. Despite having travelled widely in the tropics, she was amazed by the vast extents of coconut palms everywhere along the coast: "I do not think I knew what cocoa-nuts were until I saw those at Ceylon; they are the weed of weeds, and grow on the actual sea-sand" (North, 1992). "After eight days of slow stewing, I started in an open carriage (the coach) for Colombo with two young Oxford men for companions, thoroughly nice fellows, just come from China and Japan. The road was most interesting all the way, near the beautiful shore or through swamps full of pandanus and other strange plants, with perpetual villages. I much missed the neat mat and bamboo houses of Java. In Ceylon they were mud-hovels, and everything else was less neat, the people lazier, but the little bullock-carts were very pretty. There were plenty of flowers, many of those I remembered having seen in Jamaica."Colombo is most unattractive, but cooler than Galle. All its houses seemed in process of being either blown up or pulled down. My hotel had 'temporary' actually printed on the bills."North brought letters of introduction to William Gregory (q.v.), the British governor, and upon announcing her arrival in Colombo, was promptly invited to breakfast. Gregory arranged a special car- riage on the train to Kandy (but not before North was entertained to the spectacle of his pet mongoose killing a snake). At Kandy, having left her luggage at her hotel, she proceeded to Peradeniya, where she called on Thwaites. "I found the dear old gentleman delighted to see me; and, in spite of the drizzling rain, we had a charming walk round the gardens for two hours. He had planted half the trees himself, and had seldom been out of it for forty years, steadily refusing the cut vistas, or make riband-borders and other inventions of the modern gardener. The trees were massed together most picturesquely, with creepers growing over them in a natural and enchanting tangle. The bamboos were the finest I ever saw, particularly those of Abyssinia, a tall green variety 60 or 100 feet high. The river wound all round the garden, making it one of the choicest spots on earth. Mr. Thwaites showed me also his exquisite collection of butterflies, and promised to give me some of his spare ones. He kept that promise most generously; he never said anything he didn't mean, and detested everything false. He was one of the most perfect gentlemen I have ever known, and I longed to be able to stay a while to rest and paint near him and his beautiful garden." While North was at Peradeniya, Governor Gregory visited Kandy, and both Thwaites and she were invited to dine and sleep over at the Pavilion, the governor's mansion in the hill capital. "The gar- dens were fine, but the house, from long disuse, looked very comfortless, as its master had not cared to live there since his wife's death. I was put into the huge state-rooms the Prince of Wales had occupied last. His Excellency showed me in, and looked himself to see if they had put my sheets on the bed, for nobody was there to be responsible but the gardener. I felt like a sparrow who had by a mistake got into an eagle's nest, it was such a mon- strous place, with one of those odd bunches of flowers gardeners make all over the world, on the table - a dahlia in the middle, surrounded by gardenias, then marigolds, geraniums, roses and heliotrope."Thwaites and North then joined Gregory on his special train to Colombo, and she was again prevailed upon to be the governor's guest. She thereafter took up an invitation to stay with Julia Cameron, who had abandoned her husband, Charles Hay Cameron, and moved to an estate on the banks of the Kalu Ganga (river) at Kalutara, Sri Lanka to be near her sons. "Their house stood on a small hill, jutting out into the great river which ran into the sea a quarter of a mile below the house. It was surrounded by cocoa-nuts, casuarinas, mangoes, and bread-fruit trees; tame rabbits, squirrels, and mainah-birds ran in and out without the slightest fear, while a beautiful tame stag guarded the entrance; monkeys with grey whiskers, and all sorts of fowls, were outside." An accomplished photographer, Camer- on decided she would photograph North, thereby subjecting the latter to an ordeal she would not easily forget: "and for three days she kept herself in a fever of excitement about it, but the results have not been approved of at home since. She dressed me up in flowing draperies of cashmere wool, let down my hair and made me stand with spiky cocoa-nut branches running into my head, the noonday sun's rays dodging my eyes between the leaves as the slight breeze moved them, and told me to look perfectly natural (with a thermometer stand- ing at 96°)! She then tried me with a background of breadfruit leaves and fruit, nailed flat against a window shutter, and told them to look natural, but both failed; and though she wasted twelve plates, and an enormous amount of trouble, it was all in vain, she could get only a perfectly uninteresting and commonplace person on her glasses, which refused to flatter." Directly from Kalutara, North left Sri Lanka also via Galle, on the Scindh, on 24 January 1877. She took with her dozens of oil paintings of plants and landscapes she had executed while in the island. In 1880, tiring of the steady stream of visitors wishing to see her paintings at her apartment in London, North approached Sir Joseph Hooker with a request that she fund a gallery for the collection in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. With work on the gallery under way, she left on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, going on to Hawaii in 1881. The gallery, which houses 832 of her oil paintings from around the world (in which 727 genera and some 1,000 species are represented), opened in 1882. Also displayed in the gallery are specimens of wood from 246 species of trees, collected by North on her travels. With her paintings safely on display, she then left for South Africa in 1882, to the Seychelles in 1883 and Chile the following year. On her return she retired to a country house in Gloucestershire, where she wrote her memoirs, Recollections of a Happy Life (1892), published in two volumes by her sister, Catherine Symonds, who in 1893 contributed an addendum volume of her own titled Further Recollections of a Happy Life. Marianne died on 30 August, 1890. She was 59 years old.--------------මට හිතෙන විදියට 1876-78 කාලෙ මෙයා ලංකාවෙ ඇදපු සමහර චිත්‍ර වෙන රටවල්වලදි ඇදපු ඒවා කියලා වැරදිලා දාලා තියෙනවා....උදාහරනකෙට 'Jack fruit, Singapore' කියන චිත්‍රෙ ඇන්දෙ සිංගා වල කිව්වට මේකෙ ඉන්න ගොලුබෙල්ලා ලංකාවට ආවේණික එකෙක්.. ඒ කියන්නෙ බඩු සුවර් එකටම ලංකාවෙදි ඇන්ද එකක්....මේ සීන් එක ඉස්සෙල්ලම මතුකරේ Fredd Naggs සහ Dinarzadee Raheem කරපු The Sri Lankan Land Snail Diversity කියන රිසර්ච් පේපර් එකේ 2005 දී...[ATTACH=full]189379[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

Verification: Dawasata paya keeyak thibeda?

Top Bottom