Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker - an Introduction to the First Director of Kew Gardens

Rhododendron argenteum
illustration by Walter Hood Fitch
from Rhododendrons of Sikkim Himalaya.

Sir Joseph Hooker was born at Halesworth in Suffolk on 30 June 1817 and was the son of a botanist, Sir William Hooker. His mother was also a botanist and Hooker later describes himself as "The Puppet of Natural Selection. " 

He had one older brother and three younger sisters. In an autobiographical fragment quoted on jdhooker.org.uk, he tells how, in the dirty city of Glasgow as a tot in petticoats, while "grubbing around" a wall, he became enormously excited at the discovery of a special, pretty little moss, rather like one in his father's collection, and to which he took "a great fancy."

Hooker was the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in 1841. He received a medical degree from Glasgow University and was assistant surgeon to Sir James Clark Ross's expedition to the Antarctic from 1839 to 1843. He was married twice.

Darwin and Hooker - Firm Friends for Twenty Years

Hooker became a close friend of Charles Darwin, whom he met when Darwin invited him to classify the specimens he collected while on the Beagle expedition to the Galapagos Islands in 1844. Hooker provided an empathetic listening ear for Darwin's ideas about evolution by natural selection, and he was the only person Darwin trusted enough to examine his "Essay" which was the euphemism he used for the early manuscript later to become his great work The Origin of Species. Darwin and the younger, energetic botanist, Joseph Dalton Hooker, became firm friends till Darwin's death on 19 April 1882.

A Distinguished Career in Botany

From 1847 to 1851, Joseph Hooker travelled to India and the Himalayas to collect plants from the area, where he discovered three new mosses. In 1855, he became his father's assistant at Kew Gardens and when William died ten years later, Joseph took over as director. He travelled to Palestine in 1860, to Morocco in 1871 and to the United States in 1877, the same year that he became a knight.

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker died on 10 December 1911, aged 94.

Published works

·                                 Genera Plantarum, written with George Bentham, a volume which classified every known plant genus at that time.

·                                 A revision of George Bentham's Handbook of the British Flora, a standard guide during the 1950s.

Sources:

·                                 "The World of Nature," Readers' Digest Library of Modern Knowledge, Second Edition, 1979.

·                                 www.jdhooker.org.uk

·                                 Charles Darwin and his World, Julian Huxley and H.B.D. Kettlewell, Book Club Associates, London, 1975.