Hugh Cleghorn (forester)
[4] While at Stravithie, under the influence of his grandfather, an improving laird, the young Hugh acquired an interest in estate management (including forestry) and botany.
For the next two years he was based at Shimoga and pursued his interest in botany, encouraged by Sir William Jackson Hooker[7] who had suggested that he "study one plant a day for a quarter of an hour".
[8][9] It was here that Cleghorn began to commission botanical drawings,[10] took a special interest in economic botany and noticed a decline in teak forests that had occurred since a visit by Francis Buchanan(-Hamilton) in 1801.
[11] He read the same paper at the annual meeting of the British Association held in Edinburgh in 1850, which won him a 'medium gold medal' of the Highland and Agricultural Society in 1851.
Cleghorn returned to India in 1852 and was appointed acting Professor of Botany and Materia Medica at Madras Medical College by Sir Henry Pottinger, a post confirmed two years later.
This was the time of the early development of railways in India and Cleghorn estimated that a mile of rail line needed 1760 wooden sleepers, which had a lifespan of only eight years.
In his 1851 British Association report Cleghorn had summarised existing literature[5] and cited anecdotal information from other East India Company surgeons including Alexander Gibson and Edward Balfour.
The importance placed by Gibson and Cleghorn on climate-modification (rather than purely economic concerns) as the motivation for their system of forest 'conservancy' is one that has been much discussed by historians of forestry and ecology.
Claims by authors, notably Richard Grove in his Green Imperialism, that it was the major motivation of the East India Company surgeon-Conservators have recently been disputed.
[5] As Conservator Cleghorn spent a great part of the year in travels surveying forest resources in the vast territory for which he was responsible, with three major tours each of more than six months in 1857, 1858 and 1860.
On the latter he was accompanied by Richard Henry Beddome (who succeeded Cleghorn as Conservator in Madras) and Major Douglas Hamilton, a talented artist who recorded the expedition visually.
[6][21] On returning to India with Mabel in October 1861 Cleghorn was summoned to Calcutta by Lord Canning and charged with surveying the forests of the Punjab Himalaya.
The pair worked together on the Indian Forest Act, which came into effect on 1 May 1865, following which Cleghorn was given a six-month leave to take his ailing wife home, and to attend to Stravithie following the death of his father.
[25] In 1872 he was elected president of the Scottish Arboricultural Society for two years, and subsequently played an instrumental role in the establishment of a lectureship in Forestry at the University of Edinburgh.
