This paper investigates the training and work of Regino García y Basa, a Filipino painter and botanist who shaped the science and visuality of Philippine flora in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Most well known as the lead illustrator of Manuel Blanco’s Flora de Filipinas (1877–1883), García also appears in Spanish and U.S. colonial records for his astute botanical work. His career stretched from the Jardín Botánico de Manila in 1866 to the beginnings of U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines. Given his scientific life, García provided institutional memory for U.S. colonists such that Elmer Merrill, the most widely published American botanist of Philippine flora, recognized him as “one of the very few natives of the islands who has accomplished any work of a botanical nature."
While García is one of the few better-documented Filipinos in colonial botany records, studying his work opens avenues for understanding ruptures and continuities in Philippine botany during the Spanish-to-U.S. colonial transition. By mapping García’s career, this paper also reveals a more nuanced understanding of a stratified hierarchy—shaped by race, class, and training—that existed among local men and their scientific contributions to Philippine botany. The essay contends that this more nuanced understanding provides opportunities for scholars not only to excavate and document the legacies of local actors within colonial science, but also, and more critically, to problematize their (in)visibility as collectors of flora and producers of knowledge.
