Nathaniel Lord Britton

Nathaniel Lord Britton (1859 - 1934)

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Biography

Britton is the man who founded the NY Botanical Gardens, and was its first director. Now he is mostly famous mostly for being naming plants and books after people who contributed money to the NY Botanical Gardens and working the garden's botanists as if they were slaves on a plantation. But he did a fine job of building up the garden (his one indisputable talent was in stroking the rich) and early in his tenure it was already one of the world's premiere institutions.

It's hard to list publications for him honestly, as it's hard to know how much he actually contributed to most of them. The one set of publications that are indubitably his own are his extensive papers on the flora of the Caribbean (He did a lot of research there: Murrill's Autobiography more or less implies that he tended to light out for the Caribbean as soon as the NY weather got cold, and not come back until it was nice again). But these, like all his writings, used his own American Code of Botanical Taxonomy, and are hence unintelligible without a translator. Which is a shame…