Patrick Browne’s Flowers of Mayo

By Tom Gillespie

TWO-hundred-and-thirty-three years ago (1788), Dr. Patrick Browne, a native of Mayo, compiled a massive tome entitled The Flowers of Mayo.

Browne studied medicine in Paris, graduating from the University of Rheims in 1742, and briefly continued his studies at Leiden before practising as a doctor at St. Thomas's Hospital, London.

Subsequently, he lived for many years in the Caribbean, in Antigua, Jamaica, Saint Croix and Montserrat, but retired to Mayo in 1771.

Browne published The Civil and Natural History of Jamaica in 1756, a most significant work in terms of botanical nomenclature, which included new names for 104 genera, and he promised also a volume of medical essays, but this was never printed.

Patrick was the fourth son of Edward Browne, ‘a gentleman of respectable family and handsome estate’. He was born in 1720 in Woodstock, a townland situated between Ballindine and Crossboyne.

The Brownes of Woodstock represented a minor branch of a Mayo-Galway dynasty that held estates in the West Indies and whose principal members were lords of Oranmore and Browne of Castlemacgarrett.

Little is recorded of Browne’s childhood. He received a good education - the best that the county could afford.

When he was about 16 years old, in 1737, Patrick was sent to live with a close relative in Antigua, one of the English islands in the Caribbean, which then had a substantial community of Irish-born landowners. Young Browne stayed in the West Indies for about a year but the climate disagreed ‘very much with his constitution’ and he returned to Europe.

After qualifying as a doctor, Browne moved to London and practised medicine for a few years at St. Thomas’s Hospital with the celebrated Dr. Julius Letherland, a ‘fine physician and excellent scholar’.

By 1746 Browne had returned to the Caribbean. For a short time, perhaps as long as 12 months, he lived on Antigua and ‘some other of the sugar islands’ before settling in Kingston, Jamaica.

He continued to earn his living as a physician, using his botanical knowledge to harvest plants from the wild for use in medicine.

Browne married a native of Antigua, a daughter of one of the European, perhaps Irish, settlers.

The couple had no children, and the marriage ended abruptly in a scandal that caused Browne to leave the island.

Browne’s flora manuscript includes about 750 records of plants. Some, but not all of these, were native in locations in the south-eastern part of Co. Mayo, especially in the countryside around Claremorris, and between Claremorris and Westport.

Others were garden plants - for example, Browne listed a series of conifers worth cultivating, and rose cultivars.

The plants ascribed to define localities were presumably noticed by Browne himself between the late summer of 1770 and 1787-88 when the manuscript was completed.

Among the well-known places that are mentioned as habitats of particular plants are Ashford Castle at Cong where Browne found wood sage, sneezewort and bell heather; Ballintubber Abbey, the tumbledown walls of which, despite the passing of more than two centuries and a major restoration, remain the habitat of the very persistent medicinal herb, pellitory-of-the-wall; Castlermacgarett where Patrick collected sanicle, witches-brooms in the birch trees (but misidentified these growths as mistletoe) and gathered the golden jews-war fungus; and Castle Bourke, then intact and inhabited, where saxifrages grew on the surrounding rocks.

Browne and later Aylmer Bourke Lambent collected plants on Croagh Patrick. Browne’s visit is the earliest recorded botanical investigation of this holy mountain, although it is probable that Edward Lloyd, the Welsh antiquary and naturalist, was on Croagh Patrick in 1700.

Browne wrote a list of plants from the Reek. He had found juniper, crowberry, bilberry, and ling, fairy flax, cow-wheat, milkworth and goldenrod, marsh, St. John’s-worth, mountain everlasting and sea campion.

Browne had returned from his medical duties in the West Indies about 1769, and by September 1770 he was in Dublin.

Thus not only had Browne returned home, he had begun to study the natural history of Ireland.

At first he lived in Dublin. He travelled from Dublin to Mayo, and perhaps further afield, collecting and observing, and eventually returning permanently to Mayo sometime in the middle of 1771.

Little is recorded about the last two decades of Dr. Patrick Browne’s life, apart from the simple facts that he lived in the townland of Rushbrook, south west of Claremorris, that while he suffered from gout he was still able to climb Croagh Patrick, that he noted the local flora and fauna and compiled the inventory of the plants of Ireland, and that his lists of native birds and fish are published.

Patrick Browne died at his home in Rushbrook on Sunday, August 29, 1790. He was buried in the family burial place in Crossboyne, beside his parents and brothers.

In his will he requested that a Latin inscription be placed on their grave. It is not known if the inscription was ever placed on the tomb and no family burial place is now evident within the graveyard of All Souls Church at Crossboyne.