Between Cuba and Harvard, an uncommon garden
In the summer of 1899, Boston sugar magnate Edwin F. Atkins and Harvard professors George L. Goodale and Oakes Ames gathered in a busy sugar mill in Cienfuegos, Cuba, for a meeting that led to the establishment of one of the world’s richest tropical gardens. The meeting took place at Atkins’ sugar estate, where the Harvard Botanic Station for Tropical Research and Sugarcane Investigation/Atkins Institution in Cuba would be created a few years later. It unfolded against the backdrop of the Spanish-American War and emerging U.S. imperialism. It’s a story that has fascinated science historian Leida Fernandez-Prieto, who was born in Cuba and works as a researcher at the Madrid-based Spanish National Research Council’s Institute of History. She came to Harvard in the spring to research the history of the garden as the Wilbur Marvin Visiting Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Affairs. “The three men behind the garden were...