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.
Robert Wight MD FRS FLS 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.
Yule Mervyn Charles McCann was a naturalist in India. He wrote a popular book on the trees of India and edited a major regional flora apart from publishing many of his other observations, mainly in the journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) that he was associated with.
The Blatter Herbarium (BLAT), in St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, is a major Herbarium in India. It is listed in the Index Herbariorum, published by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy and New York Botanical Garden. The Herbarium specializes in the vascular plants of western India; algae, mosses, and fungi of Mumbai; seed samples of medicinally and economically important plants of Maharashtra, and wood samples of Maharashtra. The institute holds the largest botanical collection in western India.
Ethelbert Blatter SJ was a Swiss Jesuit priest and pioneering botanist in British India. Author of five books and over sixty papers on the flora of the Indian subcontinent, he was Principal and Professor of Botany at St Xavier College, Bombay and Vice-President of the Bombay Natural History Society. In 1932, he became the first recipient of the Johannes Bruehl Memorial Medal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Philip Furley Fyson (1877–1947) was a botanist and educator who worked in India. He is noted as the author of the first illustrated volumes on the flora of the South Indian hills. The Fyson prize is instituted in his honour by the Presidency College, Chennai for work in the area of Natural science.
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 March 22, 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.
Kattungal Subramaniam Manilal is an Emeritus of the University of Calicut, a botany scholar and taxonomist, who devoted over 35 years of his life to research, translation and annotation work of the Latin botanical treatise Hortus Malabaricus. This epic effort brought to light the main contents of the book, a wealth of botanical information on Malabar that had largely remained inaccessible to English-speaking scholars, because the entire text was in the Latin language.
Isaac Henry Burkill was an English botanist who worked in India and in the Straits Settlements. He worked primarily in economic botany but published extensively on plant biology, ethno-botany, insect-plant interactions and described several species. He published a two volume compilation on the plants of economic importance in the Malay Peninsula, collating local names and knowledge. He also wrote a detailed history of botany in India. The plant genera Burkillia and Burkillianthus were named in his honour.
Joseph Mathen Pallithanam (1915–1984) was an Indian botanist. He was born to Mathachan (Vachaparampil) and Mariamma (Pallithanam) in Kainadyvillage of Kuttanadu. He belongs to a traditional agricultural family. His maternal uncle Pallithanthu Mathai Luka pioneered the backwater kayal cultivation in Kuttanadu.
Chrispus Livingstone, often referred as Livi, is an Indian research scientist, botanist, educator and multifaceted person. He was instrumental in upgrading the department of Botany to one of the top three in India. During his stint the department witnessed significant innovative changes in the curriculum with the introduction of new papers and special projects (optionals) at various levels besides high quality research projects carried out by the senior professors and their research scholars leading to several accomplishments. He was also instrumental in setting up India's first artificial horticulture farm. Among his varied interests is the taxonomy of tropical plants, especially flora of Chennai, then Madras. He is perhaps best known for his book The flowering plants of Madras City and its immediate neighbourhood.
Edavalath Kakkat Janaki Ammal was an Indian botanist who worked on plant breeding, cytogenetics and phytogeography. Her most notable work involved studies on sugarcane and the eggplant (brinjal). She also worked on the cytogenetics of a range of plants and co-authored the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants (1945) with C.D. Darlington. She took an interest in ethnobotany and plants of medicinal and economic value from the rain forests of Kerala, India. She was awarded Padma Shri in 1977.
William Grant Craib was a British botanist. Craib was Regius Professor of Botany at Aberdeen University and later worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Krishnaswamy Ramiah was an Indian agricultural scientist, geneticist, parliamentarian and the founder director of Central Rice Research Institute, Cuttack, credited with introducing systematic hybridisation programmes in rice breeding in India. The Government of India honoured him in 1957, with the award of Padma Shri, the fourth-highest Indian civilian award for his services to the nation and followed it up with the third-highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan in 1970.
Nicol Alexander Dalzell FRSE FLS was a Scottish botanist. He was one of the first persons to form the link between forest denudation and the impact of rainfall upon the wider countryside.
Jayakrishna Indraji was an Indian botanist and ethno-botanist from the Princely state of Porbander who wrote the first botanical treatise following Hooker's classification in an Indian regional language (Gujarati) - Vanaspati Shastra (1910). He also wrote and illustrated the book Plants of Cutch and their utility (1926) and contributed to the works of Rustomjee Khory where he is not acknowledged and to the works of K.R. Kirtikar, an army doctor and botanist in Bombay. He was employed by the King of Porbander State in Kutch as a Curator of Forests and Gardens from 1886 during which time he was involved in the introduction and planting of many species of plants of economic and medicinal value.
Koyapillil Mathai Matthew (1930–2004) was an Indian Jesuit priest and botanist. He extensively studied the floral diversity of Tamil Nadu, and published several research papers and books. In 1967, he established the Rapinat Herbarium at St. Joseph's College, Tiruchirappalli.
Patricia May Holmgren is an American botanist. Holmgren's main botanical interests are the flora of the U.S. intermountain west and the genera Tiarella and Thlaspi. Holmgren was the director of the herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden from 1981–2000, and editor of Index Herbariorum from 1974–2008.
Leonard John Sedgwick was an Indian civil servant who worked in the Bombay Presidency and collected and described plants as an amateur botanist. His collections are held in St Xavier's College, Bombay.
Garcinia talbotii is a large tree in the family Clusiaceae and is endemic to the Western Ghats of India. The tree has yellow latex, and can attain a height of 25 m and girth up to 2.2 m. This species was first reported from Gairsoppah Ghats in North Kanara of Karanataka district.
