Alfred Ludlam

Born in or near the town of Newry, County Down, Ireland, Ludlam lived for a while in the West Indies before coming to New Zealand, where he would spend the rest of his life apart from visits to Australia and England.

(Little is known about Ludlam's early activities in Ireland or the West Indies but a preserved specimen of the common iguana, collected by him on Tobago, is listed in an 1845 British Museum catalogue of lizards.)

He prospered in his new homeland, proving an energetic, intelligent and highly capable settler who proceeded to play an active role in the Wellington region's civic and cultural life.

His holdings included real estate in Ghuznee Street, Wellington (town sections 169 and 171),[4] and he owned a substantial riverside farm at Waiwhetū in Lower Hutt, where he ran flocks of sheep and developed a reputation as an expert in horticulture.

The farm also boasted an orchard, a spacious barn often used for public functions (such as an official dinner held for the governor, Sir George Grey, in 1851) and a stone windmill that Molesworth had erected in 1845.

(His brother-in-law, Augustus Onslow Manby Gibbes, conducted a similar Romney Marsh breeding programme at his Australian sheep property, Yarralumla (the present-day site of Australia's Government House in Canberra), during this same period).

A year after the Botanic Garden was established by means of a Crown Grant (dated 22 November 1869), Ludlam acted as a pallbearer at the funeral in Wellington of the Māori chief Honiana Te Puni, after whom the Lower Hutt suburb of Epuni takes its name.

The main reason for these trans-Tasman visits of Ludlam's was to do business in the City of Sydney, which served as New South Wales' principal trading port, population centre and seat of government.

The marriage was solemnised at St Thomas' Anglican Church, North Sydney by Ludlam's friend, the clergyman-scientist William Branwhite Clarke, and his bride was Frances "Fanny" Minto Gibbes.

This move, however, almost proved to be a fatal mistake: on 23 January 1855, the Wairarapa earthquake destroyed Newry homestead, and the Ludlams narrowly escaped being crushed to death when a brick chimney in the living room collapsed around them.

Still extant is a vivid description of the earthquake and its destructive impact on the Wellington region, written by Alfred Ludlam to Sir David in a lengthy private letter dated 8 March 1855.

She and Ludlam happened to be staying in London, at 2 Clifton Terrace, Maida Vale, when she died, and her death notice was duly published in the New Zealand press and The Sydney Morning Herald of 4 May 1877.