Philip Miller
Philip Miller FRS (1691 – 18 December 1771) was an English botanist and gardener of Scottish descent. Miller was chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden for nearly 50 years from 1722, and wrote the highly popular The Gardeners Dictionary.[1]
Life
Born in
Botanical work
Miller corresponded with other botanists, and obtained plants from all over the world, many of which he cultivated for the first time in England and is credited as their introducer. His knowledge of living plants, for which he was elected a
Miller was reluctant to use the new binomial nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus, preferring the classifications of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and John Ray at first. Linnaeus, nevertheless, applauded Miller's Gardeners Dictionary,[7] The conservative Scot actually retained a number of pre-Linnaean binomial signifiers discarded by Linnaeus but which have been retained by modern botanists. He only fully changed to the Linnaean system in the edition of The Gardeners Dictionary of 1768, though he had already described some genera, such as Larix and Vanilla, validly under the Linnaean system earlier, in the fourth edition (1754).[b]
Miller sent the first long-strand cotton seeds, which he had developed, to the new British American
The presumed portrait, engraved by C.J. Maillet and affixed to the posthumous French edition of Miller's Gardeners Dictionary, 1787, shows the wrong Miller,
Miller's two sons worked under him; one, Charles, became the first head of the
Notes
- ^ The botanical engravings in the eighth edition (1752) provided subjects painted on Chelse plates.
- ^ This edition, "corrected and enlarged" and also "abridged from the last folio edition, was reprinted in a handsome facsimile with an introduction by W.T. Stearn in 1969.
- ^ The error is demonstrated by Allen Paterson 1986:40–41.[4]
References
- ^ Le Rougetel, Hazel (1971). "Gardener extraordinary: Philip Miller of Chelsea (1691–1771)". Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. 96: 556–63.
- ^ "Miller, Philip: Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography".
- ^ 1722 is the date given by Hazel Le Rougetel, "Philip Miller/John Bartram Botanical Exchange" Garden History 14.1 (Spring 1986:32–39).
- ^ JSTOR 1586815.
- ^ Frans A. Stafleu, reviewing the facsimile of The Gardeners Dictionary in Taxon 18.6 (December 1969:713–715) p 713.
- ^ Le Rougetel 1986:32, quoting John Collinson's letter to the Duke of Bedford.
- ^ Non erit Lexicon Hortulanorum, sed etiam Botanicorum, that the book will be, not just a lexicon of gardeners, but of botanists."; noted in Paterson 1986:40–41.
- ^ International Plant Names Index. Mill.
Bibliography
External links
- Miller, Philip (1760) The Gardeners Kalendar – digital facsimile from Linda Hall Library
- Miller, Philip (1760) Figures of the most beautiful, useful, and uncommon plants, 2 vols. – digital facsimile from Linda Hall Library
- Elliott, Brent (2011) Philip Miller as a natural philosopher, in Eighteenth-century Science in the Garden - Occasional Papers from RHS Lindley Library, volume 5 March 2011.