Background
Regino Garcia y Baza was born on September 7, 1840, in Manila, Philippines. He was the oldest of five children of Joaquin Garcia y Cuesta, a native of Madrid, Spain, and Melchora Baza y Calvo, a mestiza from Manila.
Regino Garcia y Baza
Regino Garcia y Baza was born on September 7, 1840, in Manila, Philippines. He was the oldest of five children of Joaquin Garcia y Cuesta, a native of Madrid, Spain, and Melchora Baza y Calvo, a mestiza from Manila.
Regino Garcia y Baza had his early schooling in the Escuela Pia. Later he studied in Escuela Náutica where he obtained a title in surveying at the age of eighteen. He learned to work early. While enrolled in the nautical school, he employed himself in the shop of his father. When the Escuela de Dibujo y Pintura was opened in 1858 under the direction of Don Agustin Saez, a Spanish painter, he took up painting. He soon became an adept pupil and assisted Saez in the latter's private painting jobs, decorating the Teatro del Principe Alfonso which was inaugurated on May 13, 1862, making drop-curtains for theaters, designing altars of the churches of Santo Domingo, San Agustin, and that of the Capuchinos, where his oil painting Virgen de Lourdes con Bernardita was later on to grace its walls. He studied for a while in the Escuela Municipal, enrolling there on September 1, 1865.
In 1870 he was selected together with a certain Navarro as pensionado to pursue painting in the Peninsula. Political upheaval in Spain, however, prevented the continuance of his studies abroad. Another happening made his going an impossibility too: his parents had died, and he had to attend to the subsistence and education of his brothers, he being the oldest. Besides he had long accepted an appointment in the government service which made life somewhat secure. He was also giving private drawing lessons at home, in the houses of students, and in schools, besides assisting Saez.
On March 1, 1866, Regino Garcia was appointed chief gardener of the Botanical Garden of Manila after submitting to a competitive examination. A year previous he had started studying botany under Zoilo Espejo y Culebra who was then the director of the Escuela de Agricultura and that of the Garden until 1869. Garcia assisted Espejo in the preparation of the catalogs of plants of the Garden. Then he helped Ramon Jordana y Morera, Espejo's successor, in classifying plants in accordance with Padre Blanco's scheme. As the government had decided to participate in the Paris Exposition of 1877, chief forest inspector Jordana enlisted his assistance in the classification of plants designed for the exhibition, and he was named forthwith a fourth-class assistant on August 20, 1877, without prejudice to his retaining his position in the Botanical Garden. He rose in rank gradually thereafter.
By decree of the general government of April 6, 1878, in pursuance of the royal decree of July 21, 1876, creating the Comision de la Flora Forestal, Don Sebastian Vidal y Soler was named its head, and engineer Santiago Ugaldezubiaur, Macario Camacho and Regino Garcia as assistants. This office was formally constituted on May 1, 1879, under the supervision of the Inspeccion General del Ramo de Montes. About this time a third sumptuous edition of Blanco's Flora de Filipinas was being undertaken under the auspices of the calced Augustinians and under the general editorship of the brothers Sebastian and Domingo Vidal y Soler in cooperation with Fr. Celestino Fernandez and Fr. Andres Naves. On account of his artistic and scientific training, Garcia became the chief illustrator of this magnificent work, thirty-five of the signed plates being his. With him collaborated, among others, such artists as Lorenzo Guerrero, Felix Martinez, Miguel Zaragoza, and his two brothers, Juan and Rosendo Garcia. After finishing this task he was promoted third-class assistant on October 11, 1881.
Garcia accompanied Vidal y Soler in his field trips covering many parts of the archipelago and was always useful to this botanist in collecting and classifying plants. One of the plants he discovered he dedicated to Fr. Victoriano Bitrain, S. J., with the name Ficus Bitrianensis. He drew and lithographed all the 100 plates with some 1000 figures of the Atlas for Vidal's Sinopsis de Familias y Generos de Plantas Lenosas de Filipinas (1883). After completing the work Vidal acknowledged the value of Garcia's contribution which he considered more important than his own Sinopsis. Garcia was an assiduous worker having ascended many important mountains and descended into unknown valleys, crossing rivers, and camping in pagan settlements, always looking for hidden forest wealth, studying plants and trees, collecting birds, woods, fishes, insects, etc. His biographer, Zaragoza (post), said that he accumulated such a wealth of knowledge that he knew every nook and crany of the Visayan Islands and those of Luzon, knowing perfectly well their flora and fauna. On August 11, 1885, he was promoted to second-class assistant.
When Vidal y Soler was named to direct the Philippine participation in the Exposicion General de las Islas Filipinas in Madrid in 1887, he had to take along Garcia as an assistant. Garcia directed the construction of bamboo and thatched houses typifying Filipino native construction and the exhibits for the forestry section. He was persuaded to stay for another year in order to supervise the Philippine and Compania Tabacalera exhibits in the Exposicion Universal de Barcelona.
Upon his return to Manila in 1889 he was appointed instructor in painting at the University of Santo Tomas and in 1890 as director of walks, gardens, and parks for Manila. He also accepted teaching positions giving lessons in drawing and decoration in the colleges of San Juan de Letran, Santa Catalina, and Santa Rosa. He continued in the forestry service, having been promoted to the first-class assistantship on March 9, 1891. An important work of the commission was the publication of the Catalogo de las Plantas del Herbario (1892), the manuscript of which was prepared by Garcia according to Dr. E. D. Merrill. This position he held until January 31, 1897, when due to the Revolution many government services were disrupted or discontinued. But in 1898 he was again called to fill the same position. His services were appreciated and given recognition in Madrid when he was named comendador ordinario of the Real Orden Americana de Isabel la Católica.
Garcia was drafted in the battalion of volunteers during the first stage of the Revolution, he having remained loyal to Spain until that time. Then he accepted the administration of the Hacienda de San Esteban of Pedro P. Roxas in Macabebe, Pampanga. He did not stay long in this job, however, and after the outbreak of the Philippine-American war, he resigned from his employment, hastened to San Fernando, and enlisted in the cause of the Revolution. He saw service in Luna's army after he was appointed colonel in the engineer corps. He helped supervise the construction of fortifications and defense works along the Rio Grande or Pampanga River near Calumpit and other points. He was also appointed as chief of Flora Forestal, and later as general inspector of forestry under Leon Ma. Guerrero, then secretary of agriculture. According to Artigas (post), he was also named a member of the Revolutionary Congress, but this must have taken place after the Constitution was framed and promulgated. He was captured in the town of Bautista, Pangasinan, and transported to Manila.
Under the American regime, the earliest office to be organized by virtue of General Order No. 50 of the United States Military Governor was the Bureau of Forestry. After receiving notice to make an application for service, Garcia presented himself with his credentials, and the first position he filled was as an assistant in the bureau on May 1, 1900. When this office was reorganized, he was appointed botanist on October 12, 1900. At the behest of the director, Captain George P. Ahern, he wrote Enumeración de las Especies Forestales de Filipinas and Una Reseña Histórica del Servicio de Montes por los Ingenieros de Montes Españoles en el Tiempo de la Dominación Española, both works serving Ahern a useful purpose in his organization work, for, heretofore, he did not have any knowledge of tropical forestry.
He wrote List of the Tree Species of the Philippine Islands, a pamphlet published by the Bureau of Forestry in 1901. He also wrote Los Arboles de la Goma, Resinas y Frutos Oleosos de Filipinas (1902), and contributed articles on botany, agriculture, and forestry to the Libertas, El Mercantil, and the Revista of the Camara de Comercio Filipino. Garcia was also useful in agricultural matters before the creation of the Bureau of Agriculture. On November 1, 1903, he was transferred to that bureau as a botanist and became assistant to Dr. E. D. Merrill, who later took him over to the Bureau of Science. He made special contributions to census statistics in 1903 and wrote a voluminous paper on rice which was abridged in the Census of that year. He resigned on March 5, 1904.
After leaving the government service, he accepted the administration of the Hacienda Jalajala owned by the Belgian fathers for whom ho worked for about two and a half years. On May 1, 1907, he accepted employment as administrator for the Hacienda San Pedro de Tunasan, in Laguna, which he discharged until January 1914 when he completely retired.
In the entire period of his official connection with the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines, he directed his interests in collecting plants and trees aggregating to 1,000 species, varieties of rice which were exhibited in different international expositions shells numbering about 1,200 species, fishes, insects, birds, and butterflies. He also supervised and directed the collecting of specimens for various museums abroad such as the Museo de Historia Natural of Madrid and its Museo Biblioteca, the Sociedad de Ciencias y Artes of Barcelona and its museum, the Museo de la Sociedad Indo-China of Paris, the Museo Balaguer of Villanueva and Geltru, the museum of the Capuchinos in Lecaros. Besides those contributed to the local museums as those that went to the Ateneo Municipal and the University of Santo Tomas. He practically built the Ateneo Herbarium consisting of 1,000 species which he all collected and identified. He interested himself in collecting human remains such as skulls from Samar which were deposited in the Ateneo and Santo Tomas collections.
Regino Garcia y Baza is remembered and recognized as an artist, botanist, forester, instructor in printing at the University of Santo Tomas, and director of walks, gardens, and parks for Manila. Garcia was a recipient of a number of diplomas and awards, such as diploma extraordinario in the Exposicion Universal de Barcelona, diploma mención-honorifica granted by the Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Pais de Filipinas for his contribution to Blanco's Flora de Filipinas, diploma de honor for his rice exhibits, the gold medal for his fish exhibits, and honorable mention for his paintings depicting Philippine views and themes in the Exposicion de Filipinas in Madrid in 1887, the gold medal for his rice exhibits in the Exposicion de Barcelona, 1888, the grand prize for his rice exhibits, the bronze medal for his exhibits of Philippine woods, honorable mention for his exhibits in the Exposicion de Paris in 1889, honorable mention for his exhibits of canes made of Philippine woods, and the bronze medal for his rice exhibits in the Exposicion de Hanoi in 1902.
Garcia was named Caballero de la Real Orden de Carlos III for having drawn and lithographed the illustrations for Vidal y Soler's Sinopsis by a royal order dated January 25, 1885, appointed jardinero mayor de los del real patrimonio by royal order of July 26, 1887, and named comendador ordinario de la Real Orden de Isabel la Catolica on November 26, 1888.
The following botanical species have been named in his honor: Vidalia Garciae Fern.Villar Guttiferae renamed Kayea Garciae (F.-Vill.), Litsea Garciae Vidal Laurineae, and Tambora Garciae Merrill Mirtaceae.
For his varied activities, Regino Garcia y Baza was made a member in the Sociedad Espanola de Historia Natural of Madrid on November 15, 1887, and socio correspondiente in the Real Academia de Ciencias Naturales y Artes of Barcelona on June 30, 1896.
Quotes from others about the person
"Regino Garcia is one of the very few natives of the Islands who has accomplished any work of a botanical nature; and, although much of his work might be criticized, still, considering the training - or rather, lack of training - he has had it is better to suspend judgment. Garcia has a very good knowledge of the forest flora of the Archipelago, not only of an economic nature but also in the matter of the identification of many of the species." - E.D. Merrill
Regino Garcia y Baza was married to Rufina Roxas. The marriage produced four children, Patrocinio, Angela, Nieves, and Simeon.
