Liberica Coffee Tray

We are excited to have helped CIMS acquire this coffee tray by local artist Lisa Temple-Cox. Made of reclaimed wood and paper, it uses an engraving from our collections of the Reverend Thomas Birch Freeman (1809-1890) who was an Anglo-African Victorian missionary, botanist, and plant hunter. Born in Hampshire to a freed slave and an English mother, by 1833 he had become head gardener for Lord and Lady Harland at Orwell Park. In 1837 he was ordained, and left Ipswich with his wife to become a Methodist missionary on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana). Freeman founded nine schools (three for girls), established farms and was active in the anti-slavery cause. During one visit home, Freeman was delighted to find that Harland had built a greenhouse especially for the plants he had collected, and he is credited with introducing the people of Ipswich to the rare and exotic pineapple! When a serious outbreak of leaf rust affected the colonial coffee plantations, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens asked Freeman for some beans of a resistant variety called Liberica which successfully helped to re-establish the coffee trade.

Like Freeman, Lisa Temple-Cox is mixed race – Anglo-Malay – and was interested to discover that Liberica coffee is still grown commercially in Malaysia. This story inspired her to create the tray that you can find on display in the Mansion’s ceramics room.