Smith (Ricardo Carlos)

English horticulturist who founded an acclimatisation garden in Funchal in 1757. It included a house with reading rooms stocked with Portuguese and English newspapers, and some French ones, as well as books on farming, chemistry, botany and agriculture. According to the newspapers of the time, the garden contained cotton from India and from New Orleans, groundnuts, cassava, collections of pineapples, orange trees, mango trees and other fruit-bearing species, the coconut palm, the oil palm and the sago palm, pines of various species, etc. Musa textilis, the paper mulberry (Broussonetia?) and sorghum also grew there; on this last plant Ricardo Smith published a work with the following title: Instrucções theoricas e praticas sobre a cultura do Holcus saccharatus... (Funchal, 1858, 62 pp.).