Hooker Wm Sir
NAME: Hooker, Sir William Jackson
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 6 July 1785, at Norwich, Norfolk, England
DATE/PLACE/AGE AT DEATH: 12 August 1865, at Kew, Richmond, Surrey. Aged 80
DISCIPLINE: Botanist
FIELD: Botany
LANGUAGE: English
PARENTS: Joseph Hooker and Lydia Vincent
SIBLINGS: Five brothers, two sisters
SPOUSE: Maria Turner (d. 1872), married 1815
CHILDREN: William Dawson (1816-40), Joseph Dalton (1817-1911) and three daughters
EDUCATION: Norwich Grammar School; Starston Hall
ACHIEVEMENT(S): Director of Kew Gardens, 1841-65
MAJOR WORK: 'The British Flora', 1830-60
LIFE AND TIMES
Inspired by his father's botanical interests, from an early age Hooker collected insects, birds and plants, and in 1804, at the age of 19, he discovered a rare moss near Norwich that was identified as 'Buxbaumia aphylla' by Sir James Edward
Smith, the owner of Linnaeus's herbarium and founder of the Linnaean Society. Smith was impressed by the young Hooker, and suggested that he devote himself to botany.
He also introduced Hooker to Dawson Turner, a banker and antiquarian, who asked the youth to illustrate his 'Historia fucorum', a project that involved the production of 234 plates and took 13 years to complete.
With Turner, in 1806 Hooker made an extensive botanical trip to the wilder parts of Scotland, and the same year, at the age of 21, he was elected a fellow of the Linnaean Society. In 1808 Smith named the beautiful moss 'Hookeria lucens' and its genus after him.
Through Turner, Hooker met Banks*, who in 1809 arranged for him
to visit Iceland on a diplomatic mission, and he became the first botanist to work there. Although Hooker lost all his specimens (and almost lost his life) when the ship caught fire on the homeward journey, he still published a distinguished journal of the expedition, 'Recollections of Iceland' composed mostly from memory, in 1811.
He was elected to the Royal Society* in 1812, and that year planned an expedition to Ceylon, which was cancelled owing to an uprising there, but in 1814 he undertook a nine-month botanical tour of France, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, during which time he visited many of the most notable European scientists, including Lamarck* and Alexander von Humboldt*.
In the following year he married Maria, the eldest daughter of Dawson Turner, bought a share in the Turner family brewery at Halesworth, Suffolk, and settled down to serious botanical study.
Hooker spent five years at Halesworth (1815-20), during which time four of his five children were born - including his botanical successor, Joseph Dalton Hooker* - he published four books on mosses as well as papers for the Linnaean Society, and established his famous exotic herbarium, which many foreign botanists came to visit, including Candolle* and Robert Brown*.
In 1820 Hooker was made Regius Professor of botany at the University of Glasgow. With little suitable teaching material available, Hooker soon developed his own, including a series of folio-sized coloured drawings, mainly of medicinal plants, and a textbook, 'Flora scotica' (1821), in which he arranged the flowering plants according to the Linnaean system. He also organized botanizing trips to the Scottish Highlands, and began a collection that later was to form the nucleus for his Museum of Economic Botany (founded 1847 at Kew).
An enlarged edition of Hooker's 'Botanical Illustrations' was published in 1837, and in the same year Hooker produced his 'Icones Plantarum'. Meanwhile, he had spent a great deal of time extending Glasgow's botanic garden, increasing its species from 8,000 to 20,000, making it the equal of any garden in Europe.
In 1836 Hooker was knighted for his services to botany, and in 1840, after much campaigning, his scheme for a national botanic garden at Kew (of which Banks had once been director) was accepted, and in 1841 Hooker was appointed as the gardens' first director.
On his arrival, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew comprised only eleven acres and had no library or herbarium; by the following year, Hooker had arranged for W. A. Nesfield to begin landscaping the great avenues, grassland and vistas of modern Kew, and at the same time nbegan himself to plan and rebuild the glasshouses.
Hooker's greatest achievement was perhaps the construction of the Palm and Temperate Houses, completed in 1848, but by 1846, when he had been at Kew only five years, he had already increased the gardens to their present size of nearly 300 acres, and that year opened them to the public.
Hooker superintended every development at Kew and designed and supervised the construction of much of the landscape itself, including the lake and Rhododendron Walk (made to receive the Sikkim rhododendrons discovered in the Himalayas by his son Joseph).
During his directorship, the Kew collections were greatly increased, with specimens brought from all over the world; Hooker's former students sailed with every government expedition (including those of John Ross* and William Edward Parry to the Arctic), and were based in every quarter of the globe), while Hooker was also sent numerous new exotics from private growers, and from the botanic gardens in the new British colonies.
Hooker also continued to publish a great deal during his 25 years at Kew, including his great work 'The British Flora' (1830-60) and five books on ferns, which remain standard works. In 1859, in an attempt to combat malaria, he sent Clements Markham* to Peru to acquire living specimens of cinchona', a cheap source of quinine, and, after acclimatization at Kew, the plants were established in the Indian Nilghiri Hills.
In 1855 Joseph Dalton Hooker became his father's assistant at Kew, and on Hooker's death at Kew, succeeded him.
ASSESSMENT: His greatest work was the enlarging and transforming of Kew Gardens in England in the mid-19th century into one of the world's leading botanical gardens, with their superb Temperate and Palm Houses.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: Asa Gray* stayed with him in Glasgow
A friend of Burdett-Coutts*
ONELINER: William J Hooker, first director of Kew Botanical Gardens
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
DSB
Allen, M., The Hookers of Kew, 1785-1911, London: Michael Joseph, 1967.
Multimedia:
Connections 3 Episode 8. "Fire from the Sky"