page_title: Robert Kyd
section_title: Life and career
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Kyd / Life and career
caption_attribution_description: Kyd monument. The botanical garden at Howrah, was known as ‘East India Company’s Garden’ or the ‘Company Bagan’ or ‘Calcutta Garden’ and later as the ‘Royal Botanic Garden’ which after independence was renamed as the ‘Indian Botanic Garden’ in 1950. It came under the management of the Botanical Survey of India on January 1, 1963. From June 25, 2009 it is renamed as ‘Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden’.
context_page_description: Colonel Robert Kyd was a British army officer stationed in India. He founded the botanical garden at Calcutta in 1787.
context_section_description: Little is known of Kyd's early life. He was born in Scotland at Forfarshire (now Angus), the son of Thomas, a merchant, and Rachel Eccles. He may have studied medicine at Edinburgh. He joined the Bengal Engineers as an ensign in 1764. He became a lieutenant a year later, a captain on 3 April 1768, major on 29 May 1780, and lieutenant-colonel by 7 December 1782. He was then made a Secretary to the Military Department of Inspection in Bengal and continued in that post until his death.
  Kyd was interested in horticulture and owned a private garden in Shalimar near Howrah. He proposed the idea of a botanic garden to the then Governor-General Sir John Macpherson, who passed on the idea to the Court of Directors of the East India Company. His idea was that it should help in finding alternate sources of food to prevent famines and to identify plants that might be commercially useful. The plants he mentioned included the sago palm from Malaya and the Persian date. The plan was approved on 31 July 1787 and Kyd was made an honorary superintendent. Kyd had proposed that the botanical garden would help in introduction of economically important plants and help the East India Company "outstrip our rivals in every valuable production which nature has confined to this part of the globe". By 1790 Kyd had 4000 plants in the garden and when the botanist Joseph Hooker visited in 1848, he noted that it had "contributed more useful and ornamental tropical plants to the public and private gardens of the world than any other establishment before or since".
  A genus Kydia (Kydia calycina) in the family Malvaceae was named after him by William Roxburgh.
caption: Kyd memorial urn by Thomas Banks (1795) at the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden.
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D90", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "ViewNX 2.0 W", "Image DateTime": "2011:01:10 16:40:32", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ReferenceBlackWhite": "[0, 255, 0, 255, 0, 255]", "Image ExifOffset": "286", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 2, 0, 0]", "Image GPSInfo": "888", "EXIF ExposureTime": "4294967/1073741814", "EXIF FNumber": "10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Unidentified", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "200", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2011:01:08 10:28:18", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2011:01:08 10:28:18", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "85", "EXIF SubSecTime": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2848", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4288", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[0, 2, 0, 2, 1, 2, 0, 1]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "127", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Landscape", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0"}