National Centre on Wetlands and Marine Biodiversity in Bhubaneswar and National Centre on Olive Ridley and Marine Biodiversity at Gahirmatha; Jardin de Lorixa
Following is from a PIB dated June 1 2011.
The Chief Minister of Odisha, Shri Naveen Patnaik has inaugurated a Museum Gallery on North East Biodiversity in the Regional Museum of Natural History (RMNH) Bhubaneswar today. The Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Environment & Forests, MoEF Shri Jairam Ramesh, was also present on the occasion. This Museum Gallery depicts the natural heritage of North-Eastern India which includes two of the 34 Biodiversity hotspots in the World: Himalayas and Indo-Burma.
On the occasion, Shri Jairam Ramesh, said that his Ministry would establish two institutions, the National Centre on Wetlands and Marine Biodiversity in Bhubaneswar, and National Centre on Olive Ridley and Marine Biodiversity at Gahirmatha in Odisha.
On the sidelines of the programme the Minster also inaugurated the Fragrance Garden at the Regional office of the Ministry of Environment and Forests. He announced that this would be developed into a Biocultural park. He also announced that the Ministry would make efforts to get a digital copy of Jardin de Lorixa, considered to be the earliest scientific documentation of traditional/ indigenous knowledge about plants of Orissa, of which only one manuscript is available in Natural History Museum Paris (France).
During this occasion brochures on North East Biodiversity Gallery was released by Shri Naveen Patnaik, and on the Museum by Shri Jairam Ramesh. .
… This new gallery on North East Biodiversity is having exhibits depicting Different eco-regions of North East, the course of the mighty river Brahmaputra, Kaziranga –The habitat of one horned Indian rhinoceros, the endemic and endangered avifauna, rich diversity of non human primates, Orchids and rhododendron of North East, New species discoveries from Eastern Himalayas, the hills, waterfalls, sacred groves of Meghalaya and the Loktak lake – a unique habitat of Sangai etc.
Following are excerpts on the Jardin de Lorixa.
- From http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12120: "Jardin de Lorixa ("Flora of Orissa") authored by a certain L’Empereur, an outstanding work consisting of 725 double-folio paintings of 722 plant species"
- From http://www.circulatingknowledge.ugent.be/index.php?id=16&type=file: " *Jardin de Lorixa* a lesser known herbal commissioned by a French surgeon in Bengal in the early 18th century."
- From http://www.conservationandsociety.org: "a long forgotten herbal known as Le Jardin de Lorixa ( The garden of Orissa ) and credited to a surgeon named Nicolas L’Empereur in the employ of the French Compagnie des Indes"
- The book "Relocating Modern Science Circulation and the Construction of Scientific Knowledge in South Asia and Europe : Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries" by Kapil Raj (Maître de conférences at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris) has one of its six sections dedicated to this. This section is titled: "I. SURGEONS, FAKIRS, MERCHANTS, AND CRAFTSMEN : MAKING L’EMPEREUR’S JARDIN IN EARLY MODERN South Asia" and has the following chapters.
- 1. From a Forgotten Codex in a Paris Archive
- 2. To Eastern India in the Seventeenth Century
- 3. The Origins of the Jardin de Lorixa
- 4. Making the Jardin de Lorixa
- 5. The Jardin de Lorixa and the Hortus MaLibaricus
- 6. L’Empereur’s Jardin Comes to Paris
- 7. And Gets Anonymized in the Jardin du Roi
June 1st, 2011
