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Charles Christopher Parry was born on August 28, 1823 in Admington, Gloucestershire, England. He was the son of Joseph and Eliza (Elliott) Parry, came of a line of clergymen of the Established Church. His family moved from England when he was nine years of age to a farm in Washington County, New York. The lad showed promise in the schools and an eager interest in the native plants.
Charles Christopher Parry attended Union College (Bachelor of Arts 1842) and then went as a graduate student to Columbia College, where he came under the influence of the botanist, John Torrey, and took the degree of Doctor of Medicine in 1846.
In 1846 Charles Christopher Parry settled at Davenport, Iowa, and began practice, but the unspoiled flowering prairies led him year by year further and further from what he considered the vexations of a physician's life to an ever-increasing absorption in botanical work. In 1848 he served under David Dale Owen in the geological survey of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, and in the next year was appointed botanist to the United States and Mexican boundary survey. In this connection he gave the greater part of the next three years to geological and botanical field work along the boundary from Texas to San Diego, and consequently was well fitted to furnish the introduction, "Botany of the Boundary, " to the Survey's report on botany written by John Torrey. This first-hand experience with the remarkable vegetation of the southwestern deserts, still largely unknown to botanists, confirmed his natural bent.
After 1849, for nearly forty years, he devoted his summers chiefly to botanical exploration of the little-known western states and territories, either on his own initiative or as botanist to some surveying expedition or special mission. He was the first to hold the post of botanist in the United States Department of Agriculture and spent three years (1869 - 1871) in Washington at the Smithsonian Institution, organizing the plant collections brought back by government scientific or surveying expeditions. The alpine flora of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado attracted him, and in his explorations he discovered the species of spruce which he called Picea Engelmannii and named Gray's Peak and Torrey's Peak for Asa Gray and John Torrey who visited him in his cabin. In 1874, he took up the old trail of John C. Fremont in southern Utah, making discoveries that brought his name to the notice of plant geographers.
As the years passed he visited California more and more frequently in connection with his studies of the chaparral. Thorough, cautious, and conscientious, he journeyed in the winter of 1884 - 1885 to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, England, in order to compare his California specimens with types there before publishing his revisions of California manzanitas and the species of Ceanothus. This region was so new to collectors that he turned up many new species, but, what is more important, he was the first investigator of these groups to study living plants in the field in connection with specimens in the herbarium.
His many botanical papers were rather brief and mainly of a special character, but his numerous contributions to the newspaper press of Chicago, St. Louis, Davenport, and San Francisco, continued for many years, covered a wider field, dealing with the natural resources of the new West and the general features of the native vegetation of mountains and valleys. Genial and unaffected in manner and affectionate in disposition, Parry had a capacity for cultivating warm and enduring friendships that stood the tests of camping trips and hundred or thousand-mile botanical journeys. In the Rocky Mountains of Colorado he had the company of Edward Lee Greene, and on a wide circuit through the forests of the Pacific Coast that of George Engelmann. John Gill Lemmon was his companion in a survey of the untouched San Bernardino Mountains, the western Mohave Desert, and the broad plain of the San Joaquin in California, while for two trips into Lower California he chose as a helper Charles Russell Orcutt, whom he brought up to be a notable collector. The wide and easy range of his personal relations furthered his botanical activities in numberless ways. Through J. D. B. Stillman, "forty-niner" and Leland Stanford's personal physician, who had been a fellow student at the medical school, Parry obtained a railway pass on all the Stanford lines, a favor which greatly facilitated his field work.
A zest for scraping acquaintance made the little man with the short quick step and delightful ways a welcome figure along routes of travel. Though generally tolerant, Parry could speak boldly at need, as when he printed a sharp denunciation of Katharine Curran, a botanical free lance possessed of talents for personal abuse. The beautiful Lilium Parryi of the Southern California mountains, the Lote Bush (Zizyphus Parryi) of the Colorado Desert, the Ensenada Buckeye (Aesculus Parryi) are but a few of the hundreds of new plant forms: trees, shrubs, and flowers, discovered by Parry in western America. He did his work chiefly at a time when danger of the Indian was largely past, and before herds, the plow, and industrialism had changed or obliterated the native plant societies. His happy personality is, therefore, associated with the most romantic and fruitful period of botanical exploration in the Far West.
During his frequent and prolonged journeys through four decades, the home at Davenport had been steadily maintained and here Charles Christopher Parry died on February 20, 1890.
Charles Christopher Parry discovered and named many plant species, including the Colorado Blue Spruce, the Torrey Pine, and the Englemann Spruce, Parry Pinyon, Parry's Lily, and Parry's Pestemon plants, etc. He was the first botanist employed by the United States Department of Agriculture (1869). He was also an avid mountaineer, estimating the height of Longs Peak and being the first to ascend Torreys Peak and Grays Peak, which he also named.
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In 1853 Charles Christopher Parry married Sarah M. Dalzell, who died in 1858. In 1859 he married a widow, Emily R. Preston.
