Background
He was born at Kirke House, Traquair, Peeblesshire, of poor parents, and began life in the gardens of the Earl of Traquair.
Botanist horticulturist mycologist
He was born at Kirke House, Traquair, Peeblesshire, of poor parents, and began life in the gardens of the Earl of Traquair.
Between 1785 and 1801 he published his Fasciculus plantarum cryptogamicarum Britanniae, a four-volume work in which he published over 400 species of algae and fungi that occur in the British Isles He is also the author of Collection of Dried Plants, Named on the Authority of the Linnaean Herbarium and Other Original Collections. The plant genus Dicksonia is named after him. While still young he went to Jeffery"s nursery-garden at Brompton, and in 1772 started in business for himself in Covent Garden.
His portrait by Henry Perronet Briggs (1820) was lithographed.
Dickson in 1788 became one of the original members of the Linnean Society, and in 1804 was one of the eight original members and a vice-president of the Horticultural Society.