Makers of British Botany; a collection of biographies by living botanists

by Unknown

Outline of Career.

John Lindley was born on February 5, 1799, in Catton near Norwich. His father, George Lindley, who came of an old Yorkshire family, conducted a large nursery and fruit business in Catton. To the facts that John Lindley became in early years an accomplished field botanist and also learned much of practical horticulture may be ascribed the close touch which he maintained throughout his botanical career with the practical side of botany. It is not too much to say that John Lindley was the unique representative of a class of man which he himself declared had never existed, namely one which combined the qualities of a good physiologist with those of a practical gardener of the greatest experience. John Lindley's youthful ambition was however to be not a savant but a soldier, and though, owing to the inability of his father to buy him a commission, that ambition was not fulfilled, the instinct which prompted it found frequent expression throughout Lindley's life. As his career demonstrates, he was a first class fighting man. The curious may find in the pages of the Gardeners' Chronicle records of the combats which he waged on behalf of horticulture and we shall have occasion presently to refer to the most important of all his campaigns in the cause of science.

When John Lindley was about 19 or 20 years of age his father's affairs became involved, and the son with an impulsiveness as just as it was foolish insisted, against the advice of friends, on becoming surety for the father. The mill-stone of financial anxiety thus early hung about his neck caused him trouble throughout his life.

Possessed of nothing but youth, a sound education, great natural ability and one good friend, John Lindley at the age of 20 left Norfolk for London. Thanks to a letter of introduction from the friend (Sir William Hooker) he obtained a post as assistant-librarian to Sir Joseph Banks. He thus gained access to a good library and became acquainted with a large number of men, both English and foreign, interested in scientific subjects. That he made the most of his opportunities is evident, for we find him at 21 a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a member of the Bonn Academy of Natural History. In 1822 began Lindley's long connection with the Horticultural Society, which he served first as Garden Assistant-Secretary, then (1826-1860) as Assistant-Secretary and finally as Secretary.

The portrait which accompanies this sketch is a reproduction of that painted by Mr Eddis, R.A., at the instance of friends of Lindley about the time of his resignation of the Secretaryship of the Horticultural Society.

The most conspicuous direct services rendered by Lindley to the Society were the laying out of the Society's garden at Chiswick and the organisation, with Bentham, of the celebrated flower-shows which have served as models for the exhibits of horticultural societies all over the world. Those who know how extraordinarily valuable, not only to horticulturists but also to botanists, are the periodical "shows" held by the Royal Horticultural Society, will be grateful to Lindley for the perspicuity which led him to replace the old and gaudy "fêtes" by these admirable exhibitions.

Lindley's Professorship of Botany in University College, London, dates from 1828 and was held for over a quarter of a century. Among those who attended his lectures were Carpenter, Edwin Lankester, Griffith, Daubeny and Williamson. His lectureship to the Society of Apothecaries began in 1835, and in 1841 in which year the Gardeners' Chronicle was founded, he became editor of that periodical. This post he held till his death in 1865.

It might be supposed that the multifariousness and onerousness of Lindley's official and routine duties left little time for other work. Yet Lindley made time not only for scientific investigation and for the writing of numerous monographs and text-books; but also for a large and varied amount of public work. In the Lindley correspondence preserved at Kew are to be found letters and papers (official correspondence 1832-1854) criticising trenchantly the mismanagement of the Royal forests and recommendations on the selection and cultivation of trees for the charcoal employed in the manufacture of gunpowder.

Lindley, together with Hooker, acted as adviser to the Commissioners of the Admiralty with respect to the planting of the Island of Ascension.

The potato famine was the occasion of an official visit to Ireland and led to a report by Lindley, Sir Robert Kave and Sir Lyon Playfair which was the immediate cause of the Repeal of the Corn Laws. As Sir Robert Peel told Lindley "in the face of the Report, the repeal could no longer be avoided." Thus the potato takes rank with the chance word, the common soldier, the girl at the door of an inn that have changed or almost changed the fate of nations.