Background
Lindley was born on February 5, 1799, at Old Catton, Norwich, England, where his father, George Lindley, author of A Guide to the Orchard and Kitchen Garden, owned a nursery garden. His mother was Mary Lindley.
71a The Cl, Norwich NR1 4DD, United Kingdom
Lindley's father, George Lindley, a skilled but financially unsuccessful nurseryman, could not afford to buy his son an officer’s commission in the army or university education but gave him a good schooling in Norwich to the age of sixteen.
71a The Cl, Norwich NR1 4DD, United Kingdom
Lindley's father, George Lindley, a skilled but financially unsuccessful nurseryman, could not afford to buy his son an officer’s commission in the army or university education but gave him a good schooling in Norwich to the age of sixteen.
Botanist gardener orchidologist scientist
Lindley was born on February 5, 1799, at Old Catton, Norwich, England, where his father, George Lindley, author of A Guide to the Orchard and Kitchen Garden, owned a nursery garden. His mother was Mary Lindley.
Lindley's father, George Lindley, a skilled but financially unsuccessful nurseryman, could not afford to buy his son an officer’s commission in the army or university education but gave him a good schooling in Norwich to the age of sixteen.
Late in 1832 the University of Munich, at the instigation of Martius, enterprisingly conferred an honorary Ph. D. upon Lindley.
Lindley early displayed his remarkable powers of sustained work by translating into English at one silting L. C. M. Richard’s Démonstrations botaniques, ou Analyse du Fruit (1808), published in 1819 as Observations on the Structure of Seeds and Fruits. In 1818 or 1819 he entered the employment of Sir Joseph Banks as an assistant in the latter’s rich library and herbarium, working there for eighteen months with Robert Brown. Banks died in 1820. The Horticultural Society of London had commissioned Lindley in that year to draw some single roses, and in 1822 he entered its service as assistant secretary of its newly established Chiswick garden, thus beginning an association of forty-three years. His early publications, for which Banks’s library and herbarium provided facilities then unrivaled, included Rasarum monographic (1820), Digitalium monographia (1821), Collectanea botanka (1821-1825) and a Survey of the Rosaceae Subfamily Pomoideae (Pomaceae), published in Transactions of the Limnean Society of London, in which he established the genera Chaenotneles, Osteometes, Eriobotrya, Photinia, Chamaemeles, and Raphiolepis, all still accepted. Together with contributions to the Botanical Register (beginning with volume 5, plate 385, August 1819), they quickly won him an international reputation.
These youthful publications displayed remarkable taxonomic judgment, detailed observation, and precision of language in both English and Latin, In 1828, despite his lack of university education, Lindley was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London and appointed professor of botany in the newly founded University of London, giving his inaugural lecture in April 1829. He did not, however, relinquish his employment by the Horticultural Society, of which he became general assistant secretary in 1827 and secretary in 1858; indeed, he carried a heavy load of responsibility and made important innovations during the society’s troubled years. In 1838 he prepared the report on the management of the royal gardens at Kew which led ultimately to the foundation of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, as a national botanical institution.
In 1862 his health declined, and Lindley had reluctantly to give up posts he had so honorably and industriously held over many years. In 1865 he died, within a few months of his lifelong friends William Jackson Hooker and Joseph Paxton. His orchid herbarium was acquired by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; his general herbarium by the department of botany, University of Cambridge. His private library, very rich in botanical tracts and pamphlets, became the foundation of the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society of London, of which he had been so long an efficient servant.
As a young man Lindley campaigned vigorously against the artificial “sexual system” of classification of plants introduced by Linnaeus and in favor of a more natural system, as propounded by A, L. de Jussieu and A. P. de Candolle and improved in detail by Robert Brown. On his appointment as a professor, he immediately prepared for the use of students A Synopsis of the British Flora, Arranged According to the Natural Orders, the second account of British plants thus classified. In 1830 he published Introduction to the Natural System of Botany which was the first work in English to give descriptions of the families (then called “natural orders”) on a worldwide basis; it embodied detailed, firsthand observations of their representatives in the garden and herbarium. Uninfluenced by theories of evolution, and hence without thought of phylogeny, Lindley regarded the characters of plants as “the living Hieroglyphics of the Almighty which the skill of man is permitted to interpret. The key to their meaning lies enveloped in the folds of the Natural System.” This he continuously sought to unfold, with but partial success. He took the view that “the investigation of structure and vegetable physiology are the foundation of all sound principles of classification,” that within the vegetable kingdom “no sections are capable of being positively defined, except as depend upon physiological peculiarities,” and that “physiological characters are of greater importance in regulating the natural classification than structural.”
This emphasis led Lindley astray and resulted in major classifications which he himself never found wholly satisfactory, since he changed them from work to work, and which other botanists accepted only in part. Because, however, he also believed “that the affinities of plants may be determined by a consideration of all the points of resemblance between their various parts, properties, and qualities; and that thence an arrangement may be deduced in which these species will be placed next to each other which have the highest degree of relationship,” he gave attention to a much wider range of characters than did many of his contemporaries. Such information, derived from Lindley’s profound and extensive observation of plants and a thorough study of available literature, made his Introduction to the Natural System and its enlarged successors, A Natural System of Botany and The Vegetable Kingdom, reference works long unrivaled for matters of detail. In the 1836 work, Lindley introduced a nomenclatural reform by proposing its divisions of the same hierarchical standing should have names formed in the same distinctive way, with terminations indicative of these divisions. Thus he consistently used the termination “-aceae” for names of natural orders (now called “families”), replacing, for example, “Umbelliferae” by “Apiaceae” (from opium, celery) and “Leguminosae” by “Fabaeeae” (from faba, broad bean), and the termination “-ales” for alliances (now called “orders”); this became the internationally followed procedure.
Lindley was a man endowed with an extraordinary capacity for work and a restless, aggressive, untiring intellect, who attained distinction in all his varied activities.
In 1823 Lindley married Sarah Freestone (1797-1869). They rented a house in rural Acton Green, a location convenient for the Society's garden at Turnham Green.