Greetings my friends. News recently reached me that a colossal seed bank has been opened in the frozen Arctic regions of Norway. This refrigerated repository is intended ultimately to gather together seeds of almost all the major food crops in existence, and to provide an alternative source of seeds should smaller national seed collections become damaged or even destroyed. This project has caught my attention for two reasons: firstly, I have had a life-long interest in botany and horticulture, and secondly, because the notion of an improved ice-house, or as I preferred to call it a Frigidarium, is one to which I devoted a great deal of time and study.

My interest in botany germinated, if the expression might be forgiven, in boyhood. Indeed I recall that at the age of 19 I was writing to my father about seeds while I was at Oxford, asking to be sent Webb’s Seed Catalogue, and three years later visiting Gordon’s Seed Shop in Fenchurch Street. I remember visiting Paris in 1770 and examining the vegetables there: in truth, the French nurseries did not have nearly the choice we had in England. While my brother Samuel was in Russia in the 1780s I visited him there, and together we made many contacts with botanists in St Petersburg, the Crimea, and Siberia. I sent them seeds and cuttings from England, and they in return sent plants and seeds to England. In London I was friends with Mr William Aiton, the Royal Gardener, and visited him at Kensington, where he showed me the new hot-houses warmed by steam, and with Mr James Lee, who had a nursery at the Vineyards at Hammersmith, and who corresponded with Linnaeus. Friends who travelled widely sent me seeds from Calcutta, Nepal, Chile, and Portugal. While not wishing to self-trumpet, I even asked Simon Bolivar, the Liberator, to send seeds from South America, and I was very proud of the Syrian Rose sent to me by Lafayette, the French General. In those days seeds were sent across continents without restriction, and any seeds I received I shared amongst keen botanists like Lee and Aiton. We tried with the aid of cold frames and heated greenhouses to grow all sorts of exotic plants, vegetables, and fruits. I have grown melons, apricots, grapes, Egyptian cucumbers, and that new vegetable, the marrow, a relative of the pumpkin. I ask myself, did they become popular?

My nephew George Bentham, who cut his teeth on my writings on logic and other subjects, eventually chose botany over the law and went on to become a very well-known botanist. His magnum opus the ‘Handbook of British Flora’ ran into many editions, and he laboured tirelessly for decades at the Gardens at Kew. The classificatory system devised by Linnaeus is still used in the study of botany today, and I would be flattered to think that I might be remembered as one who has successfully applied that bifurcatory method to legislation and to other fields of art and science.

Although I was a keen collector of seeds, I must confess that it did not occur to me to preserve them by refrigeration, but I did experiment with methods of preserving food. I wanted to preserve food surpluses from season to season, and for a while the matter was somewhat of an obsession with me. Previously only found in the houses or grounds of the wealthy, I thought surely ice-houses could be used to preserve food in times of plenty for use by the population at large in times of scarcity. In 1800 I was introduced to the nephew of my friend Samuel Romilly, Peter Mark Roget (who later went on to write a Thesaurus, apparently), whom I engaged to help me construct an ice-house in my garden at Westminster. I envisaged the ice-house would preserve vegetables, fruit, meats, and fish, help in the process of brewing beer and fermenting wine, dry wood for musical instruments, and even preserve dead bodies for anatomical study. The experiment did not work – perhaps my ideas were, as usual, ahead of their time – yet I was rather upset. I see from an article in the Journal of Bentham Studies that Roget wrote to his mother to say I contributed little because I understood nothing about ice-houses, which I think is somewhat ungracious of the boy. Notwithstanding my want of success, I wrote a paper entitled ‘Frigidarium’ on the preservation of food, and the work at least is preserved here at UCL, even if we could not manage to make the ice-house preserve food.

Your ever laborious and devoted Servant

J.B.