| AdminHistory | William Roxburgh was a Scottish doctor and botanist and is widely known as the ‘founding father of Indian botany’. He worked as the superintendent at Calcutta Royal Botanic Gardens for twenty years and during this time produced his most famous work entitled ‘Flora Indica’. Jonas Dryander dedicated the genus Roxburghia to him and he was even referred to in his obituaries as the ‘greatest botanist since Linnaeus.’
William Roxburgh was born on 29 June 1751 in Underwood, Ayrshire. He was educated at Underwood parish school and from 1771 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he lived with Dr John Boswell and his family in south Edinburgh. He was taught botany by John Hope and surgery by Dr Alexander Monro.
After graduating, he joined the East India Company as a surgeon’s mate in May 1766. He also served as a surgeons mate on the ship Houghton in 1772 under surgeon Richard Ballantyne and in 1774 served upon the ship Queen. He returned to Edinburgh to study medicine further, receiving his Doctorate in Medicine (MD) in 1776. He was subsequently appointed to assistant surgeon to the Madras Medical Service on 28 May 1776 and was based at the general hospital there for two years. In 1780 he was promoted to Surgeon and became the Company botanist in April 1789. He collected several plants whilst in the Madras region, together with the naturalist Johann Gerhard König, a former pupil of Linnaeus.
He later became the superintendent of the Samalkot garden, where he conducted economic botany experiments. Here he cultivated black pepper and by 1789, in his experimental garden, had grown more than 40,000 plants, although they did not fruit. He had better success, however, growing coffee, sugar, mulberry and breadfruit plants. He also collected wild plants, commissioning local Indian artists to illustrate them. By 1790 he had 700 illustrations of plants, many of which he sent to Sir Joseph Banks at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
In April 1789, he took up the post of naturalist to the Madras Government. In 1793, recognised for his scientific and experimental work with crops by the Bengal government, Roxburgh was invited to take on the role of superintendent at Calcutta Botanic Garden following the death of Colonel Robert Kyd. During his tenure there, the number of plant species had increased from 300 to 3,500 by the time of his retirement. In 1799 he was elected as a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London.
Roxburgh returned to Britain due to ill health between 1798-1799 and 1805-1807. His health continued to decline and he was forced to retire and return to Scotland permanantly in 1814, stopping off at St Helena on the way. Whilst here, he wrote up an annotated list of the island’s plants, which became the only accessible printed list of the flora there until 1875. It was also published as an appendix in Alexander Beatson’s ‘Tracts relative to the island of St. Helena’ in 1816.
Before leaving India, Roxburgh left his manuscripts of ‘Hortus Bengalensis’ and ‘Flora Indica’ with the Christian missionary and anthropologist William Carey at the Serampore Mission. Carey used his printing press to publish both ‘Hortus Bengalensis, or, A catalogue of the plants growing in the ... East India company's botanic garden at Calcutta’ and ‘A catalogue of plants described by dr. Roxburgh in his MSS. Flora Indica but not yet introduced into the botanical garden’ in 1814. In 1820, Carey edited and published volume 1 of ‘Flora Indica; or Descriptions of Indian Plants’ and in 1824 with the assistance from Dr Nathaniel Wallich published volume 2.
Roxburgh died in Edinburgh on 18 February 1815 and was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard. He was survived by his children and third wife Mary. |
| Description | Manuscript for William Roxburgh’s ‘Flora Indica, Or, Descriptions of Indian Plants’, [Volume 2], published in 1824. Contains descriptions for several species of plants including A. digitata, S. tomentosa, Hibiscus, H. solandra, [Homalanthus] populneus and Robinia. |