George Bentham (1800-1884)

Born near Plymouth in 1800, George Bentham spent his childhood in Russia and France. His father was the naval architect Sir Samuel Bentham, and his uncle the political economist Jeremy Bentham.

His early plant collecting in the south of France formed the basis of his herbarium. Although Bentham studied law and qualified as a barrister, inheritances from his father and uncle enabled him to devote his life to botany.

In 1829 he became Secretary to the Horticultural Society (later the Royal Horticultural Society) and with the help of John Lindley, turned its fortunes around, sponsoring plant hunters and introducing the Society’s Chiswick Horticultural Fetes.

In 1854 Bentham presented his herbarium to Kew, by which time it numbered more than 100,000 specimens. Bentham spent most of his retirement working at Kew: in addition to his colonial floras, such as the Flora Hongkongensis and Flora Australiensis, he also produced the Handbook of the British Flora (1858), which promoted botany as a pastime for amateurs and became a classic.

In 1883 the Genera Plantarum was completed, the fruit of a 21-year collaboration with Sir Joseph Hooker. This monumental work outlined what became known as the Bentham-Hooker classification system for flowering plant, which was then adopted as the system used in the Herbarium at Kew.

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