Henry Noltie | |
|---|---|
 Henry Noltie examining a Cinchona tree in the Nilgiris, 2016 | |
| Born | Henry John Noltie |
| Occupation | Botanist |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | Ph.D. University of Edinburgh Botany University of Oxford Museum Studies University of Leicester |
Henry Noltie (born 1957) is a British botanist. He worked as a curator and taxonomist at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. [1] [2]
Noltie studied botany at the University of Oxford, and Museum Studies at Leicester. He joined RBGE in 1986. For 14 years he worked on the Flora of Bhutan [3] project, leading the team for its concluding years. He wrote two of the volumes of the Flora, relating to the monocots, for which he received a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. [4] [2]
In 1998, while working in the RBGE library, Noltie discovered thousands of botanical illustrations and a series of mounted herbarium specimens stamped with the words “Cleghorn Memorial Library”. Noltie's research lead him to the University of St Andrews library and to other parts of the RBGE archive where he began to piece together the life story of one of the 19th century's most significant botanists, Hugh Cleghorn. [5]
In 1999, Noltie wrote Indian Botanical Drawings 1793-1868 from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh published by Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. [6]
He subsequently wrote The Dapuri Drawings. Alexander Gibson and The Bombay Botanic Garden was published by The Antique Collectors' Club in association with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 2002. [7]
In 2007, Noltie wrote Robert Wight and the Botanical Drawings of Rungiah & Govindoo, a 3-volume monograph documenting the important collections of Indian botanical drawings in the Library of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Book 1, The Life and Work of Robert Wight, provided the definitive biography of Wight. Book 2, Botanical Drawings by Rungia & Govindoo: the Wight Collection. Book 3, Journeys in Search of Robert Wight, described the author's travels as he carried out the research that underpinned his work. [8]
His book Raffles' Ark Redrawn: Natural History Drawings from the Collection of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles was published in 2009 by the British Library and Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. [9]
Noltie edited and wrote the introduction for Wild Flowers: A Sketchbook by the father-and-son team: Canon Raven (1885-1964) theologian, naturalist, and historian of science, and his son John (1914-1980) a classics don and passionate field botanist. [10]
In 2016, he published Indian Forester, Scottish Laird - The Botanical Lives of Hugh Cleghorn of Stravithie [11] and The Cleghorn Collection: South Indian Botanical Drawings 1845 to 1860. [12]
In 2017, Noltie wrote about the links between the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and India in his book Botanical Art from India. [13]
Noltie contributed to the book Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company [14] which accompanied the first UK exhibition at the Wallace Collection, London of works by Indian master painters commissioned by East India Company officials. [15] [16] [17]
Francis Buchanan, later known as Francis Hamilton but often referred to as Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, was a Scottish surgeon, surveyor and botanist who made significant contributions as a geographer and zoologist while living in India. He did not assume the name of Hamilton until three years after his retirement from India.
Nathaniel Wolff Wallich was a surgeon and botanist of Danish origin who worked in India, initially in the Danish settlement near Calcutta and later for the Danish East India Company and the British East India Company. He was involved in the early development of the Calcutta Botanical Garden, describing many new plant species and developing a large herbarium collection which was distributed to collections in Europe. Several of the plants that he collected were named after him.
William Roxburgh FRSE FRCPE FLS was a Scottish surgeon and botanist who worked extensively in India, describing species and working on economic botany. He is known as the founding father of Indian botany. He published numerous works on Indian botany, illustrated by careful drawings made by Indian artists and accompanied by taxonomic descriptions of many plant species. Apart from the numerous species that he named, many species were named in his honour by his collaborators. He was the first to document the existence of the Ganges river dolphin.
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is a scientific centre for the study of plants, their diversity and conservation, as well as a popular tourist attraction. Founded in 1670 as a physic garden to grow medicinal plants, today it occupies four sites across Scotland—Edinburgh, Dawyck, Logan and Benmore—each with its own specialist collection. The RBGE's living collection consists of more than 13,302 plant species, whilst the herbarium contains in excess of 3 million preserved specimens.
Benmore Botanic Garden is a large botanical garden situated in Strath Eachaig at the foot of Beinn Mhòr, on the Cowal Peninsula, in Argyll and Bute, west of Scotland. The gardens are on the west side of the A815 road from Dunoon, between the Holy Loch and Loch Eck, and include footbridges across the River Eachaig. It is one of the sites of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Robert Wight was a Scottish surgeon in the East India Company, whose professional career was spent entirely in southern India, where his greatest achievements were in botany – as an economic botanist and leading taxonomist in south India. He contributed to the introduction of American cotton. As a taxonomist he described 110 new genera and 1267 new species of flowering plants. He employed Indian botanical artists to illustrate many plants collected by himself and Indian collectors he trained. Some of these illustrations were published by William Hooker in Britain, but from 1838 he published a series of illustrated works in Madras including the uncoloured, six-volume Icones Plantarum Indiae Orientalis (1838–53) and two hand-coloured, two-volume works, the Illustrations of Indian Botany (1838–50) and Spicilegium Neilgherrense (1845–51). By the time he retired from India in 1853 he had published 2464 illustrations of Indian plants. The standard author abbreviation Wight is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
George Arnott Walker Arnott of Arlary was a Scottish botanist. He collaborated with botanists from around the world and served as a regius professor of botany at the University of Glasgow. An orchid genus Arnottia was named in his honour in 1828.
The Siberian elm cultivar Ulmus pumila 'Pinnato-ramosa' was raised by Georg Dieck, as Ulmus pinnato-ramosa, at the National Arboretum, Zöschen, Germany, from seed collected for him circa 1890 in the Ili valley, Turkestan by the lawyer and amateur naturalist Vladislav E. Niedzwiecki while in exile there. Litvinov (1908) treated it as a variety of Siberian elm, U. pumilavar.arborea but this taxon was ultimately rejected by Green, who sank the tree as a cultivar: "in modern terms, it does not warrant recognition at this rank but is a variant of U. pumila maintained and known only in cultivation, and therefore best treated as a cultivar". Herbarium specimens confirm that trees in cultivation in the 20th century as U. pumilaL. var. arboreaLitv. were no different from 'Pinnato-ramosa'.
Alexander Gibson (1800–1867) was a Scottish surgeon and botanist who worked in India. He was born in Kincardineshire and studied at Edinburgh. He went to India as a surgeon in the Honourable East India Company. He became a superintendent of the Dapuri botanical gardens (1838-47) under the erstwhile Bombay Presidency.He was appointed as the first Conservator of Forests of India on 22 March 1847. He published several works on botany and reports on forestry in India. He laid a foundation stone of Indian forestry and made a memorable contribution.
Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn was a Madras-born Scottish physician, botanist, forester and land owner. Sometimes known as the father of scientific forestry in India, he was the first Conservator of Forests for the Madras Presidency, and twice acted as Inspector General of Forests for India. After a career spent in India Cleghorn returned to Scotland in 1868, where he was involved in the first ever International Forestry Exhibition, advised the India Office on the training of forest officers, and contributed to the establishment of lectureships in botany at the University of St Andrews and in forestry at the University of Edinburgh. The plant genus Cleghornia was named after him by Robert Wight.
Brian Laurence "Bill" Burtt FRSE FLS, was an English botanist and taxonomist who is noted for his contributions to the family Gesneriaceae. In a career that spanned 74 years, he worked first at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and then at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE). He made numerous field trips to South Africa and Sarawak and described a total of 637 new plant species. Burtt is denoted by the author abbreviation B.L.Burtt when citing a botanical name.
Thomas Anderson FLS was a Scottish botanist who worked in India. He was involved in research on cinchona cultivation in India.
Anna Maria Walker and her husband Colonel George Warren Walker (1778–1843) were Scottish botanists in Ceylon who made extensive collections of plants between 1830 and 1838. Several species of ferns and orchids were named after them by Sir William Jackson Hooker with whom they corresponded. They also corresponded with and collaborated with other botanists in the region such as Robert Wight. Anna Maria was also an excellent botanical artist who illustrated many species of orchids. Plant species named after them include Vanilla walkeriae, Liparis walkeriae and Thrixspermum walkeri.
The field elm cultivar Ulmus minor 'Viminalis' (:'willow-like'), occasionally referred to as the twiggy field elm, was raised by Masters in 1817, and listed in 1831 as U. campestris viminalis, without description. Loudon added a general description in 1838, and the Cambridge University Herbarium acquired a leaf specimen of the tree in 1866. Moss, writing in 1912, said that the Ulmus campestris viminalis from Cambridge University Herbarium was the only elm he thought agreed with the original Plot's elm as illustrated by Dr. Plot in 1677 from specimens growing in an avenue and coppice at Hanwell near Banbury. Elwes and Henry (1913) also considered Loudon's Ulmus campestris viminalis to be Dr Plot's elm. Its 19th-century name, U. campestris var. viminalis, led the cultivar to be classified for a time as a variety of English Elm. On the Continent, 'Viminalis' was the Ulmus antarcticaHort., 'zierliche Ulme' [:'dainty elm'] of Kirchner's Arboretum Muscaviense (1864).
Douglas Mackay Henderson CBE FRSE FLS was a Scottish botanist, the 12th Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh from 1970 to 1987.
Phineas Rice Hunt (1816-1878) was an American missionary printer to India and China, under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). He saw numerous works through his press in Tamil and Mandarin, including New and Old Testaments, a Dictionary of Tamil compiled by Miron Winslow, another dictionary of Tamil by G.U. Pope, Illustrations of Indian Ornithology by Thomas C. Jerdon (1847), and Illustrations of Indian Botany by Robert Wight (1850).
Rungiah aka Rungia or Rungia Raju was a 19th-century Indian botanical illustrator, noted for producing a large number of images for Robert Wight's books on Indian flora. The Raju family were painters of the Kshatriya caste of Tanjore, and were originally from the Telugu-speaking region in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
Alexander Hunter was a surgeon in the East India Company's Madras Army who was also a skilled and trained artist. In 1850 he founded the Madras School of Art, the first school of art and design in India, which was taken over by the government in 1855. He was a pioneer of photography in India, introduced courses at the art school, and founded the Madras Photographic Society. He was also a collector of geological specimens, a naturalist with interests in economic products, and a key organizer of the Madras Exhibitions of 1855 and 1857.
Ludwig Bernhard Ehregott Schmid was a German Lutheran clergyman and missionary who worked in India. Ill health led him to choose to live in Ootacamund and he spent considerable time examining local plants, and making collections of specimens, many of which were deposited in Jena where his cousin J. C. Zenker published a few descriptions but died too early to produce a more complete work. Several plant species have been named after Schmid including the fossil trees Peuce schmidiana and Mesembrioxylon schmidianum from Thiruvakkarai near Pondicherry.
Senjee Pulney Andy also spelled as S. Parani Andi or S. Parani Andy, was an Indian physician who was the first Indian to have obtained an advanced post-graduate British medical degree (MD) in 1860. He took an interest in medical botany and also attempted to create a Christian sect based on Indian cultural ideals.
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