The British Plant Hunters
The British plant hunters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — botanical collectors who travelled the world for the Royal Horticultural Society, the great commercial nurseries, and private patrons — transformed European and American gardens by introducing thousands of new species. Many of the most common garden plants today were introduced this way.
Joseph Banks (1743-1820)
Banks travelled with Captain Cook on the Endeavour (1768-1771), collecting around 1,300 species new to European science. As unofficial director of Kew from 1772, he funded and dispatched plant collectors all over the world.
David Douglas (1799-1834)
Sent by the RHS to the Pacific Northwest of America. Introduced the Douglas fir (named for him), the Sitka spruce, lupins, the flowering currant, and around 240 other species.
Robert Fortune (1812-1880)
Travelled three times to China between 1843 and 1860, introducing forsythia, weigela, jasmine, and most importantly the tea plant — which broke the Chinese monopoly when Fortune smuggled plants and tea workers to Darjeeling for the East India Company.
Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911)
Banks's spiritual heir, who collected in the Himalayas (1847-1851) and other regions, introducing many rhododendron species that transformed estate gardens in cool wet climates from Cornwall to Ireland.
Ernest Wilson (1876-1930)
Possibly the greatest of all, Wilson collected in China for the Veitch nursery and later the Arnold Arboretum. Introductions include Davidia involucrata (the handkerchief tree), Lilium regale, and over 1,000 species new to cultivation.
Frank Kingdon-Ward (1885-1958)
The last great plant hunter of the heroic era, who collected in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, in northern Burma and in Assam, with twenty-five expeditions over fifty years.
Legacy
British plant hunters fundamentally shaped what a temperate-climate garden contains today. Many gardens — Caerhays in Cornwall, Howick Hall in Northumberland, Castle Howard — were specifically built to house plants from these expeditions.
Explore on the map
All of the gardens mentioned in this article are pinned on the interactive map. Use it to plan a route, group nearby sites into a single trip, or compare gardens by style and season.