Background
Philip Miller was born in Bromley, Greenwich, or Deptford, London, United Kingdom in 1691 to the family of a gardener Joseph Miller. It is known that he was of Scottish descent.
Philip Miller was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
https://www.amazon.com/Gardeners-Dictionary-Containing-Cultivating-Conservatory/dp/1296615839/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=The+Gardener%27s+Dictionary+containing+the+Methods+of+Cultivating+and+Improving+the+Kitchen+Fruit+and+Flower+Garden&qid=1578477934&sr=8-1
1731
Botanist gardener horticulturist scientist writer
Philip Miller was born in Bromley, Greenwich, or Deptford, London, United Kingdom in 1691 to the family of a gardener Joseph Miller. It is known that he was of Scottish descent.
Miller’s father, a gardener of Scots origin, gave him good schooling including the one in botany.
Miller early set up in business in the London area as a florist, grower of ornamental shrubs, and planter and designer of gardens. Thus he came to the notice of Sir Hans Sloane, who had bought the manor of Chelsea in 1712 and had become the ground landlord of the Chelsea site which the Society of Apothecaries had leased since 1673 for their physic garden or hortus medicus. In 1722 Sloane transferred it in perpetuity to the Society of Apothecaries for use as a botanic garden. A condition in the deed of conveyance was that every year the Apothecaries should give the Royal Society fifty good herbarium specimens of distinct plants grown that year in the garden “and no one offered twice until the complete number of two thousand plants have been delivered."This necessitated the continual introduction of new plants. On Sloane’s recommendation, Miller was appointed head gardener in 1722. The Chelsea botanic garden then became possibly the most richly stocked of any garden of the mid-eighteenth century, and Miller recorded his firsthand experience in his publications. In 1724 he published his two-volume octavo Gardeners and Florists Dictionary, replaced in 1731 by the one-volume folio Gardeners Dictionary, of which eight editions appeared in his lifetime. They provide not only cultural but also descriptive botanical information, including the characters of each genus and diagnoses of the species. From them, there arose after Miller’s death a series of encyclopedic works on cultivated plants culminating in the Royal Horticultural Society’s Dictionary of Gardening (1951).
Miller remained in charge of the Chelsea Physic Garden until 1770 when most reluctantly retired with a pension.
Miller derived his concept of genus and his generic names from the Institutiones rei herhariae (1700) of Tournefort, who recognized genera of first rank based on floral and fruiting characters and genera of second rank based on vegetative characters, whereas Linnaeus Tournefort’s successor and Miller’s contemporary, in his Species plantarum (1753) recognized only first-rank genera and united Tourncfort’s second-rank genera with them - thus including, for example, Abies and Larix in Pinns. Miller accepted Linnaeus’ classification and nomenclature reluctantly and never wholeheartedly. Thus in 1754, by continuing to use, in the fourth abridged edition of his Gardeners Dictionary, the Tournefortian names he had always used but which Linnaeus had suppressed in 1753, Miller brought these names back into post-Linnaean botanical literature and so became an inadvertent innovator; he is now cited as the authority for some eighty generic names, among them Abies and Larix, really derived from his predecessors. In the eighth edition (16 April 1768) of his Gardeners Dictionary, Miller at last adopted Linnaean binomial nomenclature for species; he also published some 400 specific names for plants imperfectly known or unknown to Linnaeus, or otherwise classified by him. These works of 1754 and 1768 earned Miller his lasting place in systematic botany.
Philip Miller was a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Quotes from others about the person
"He added to the theory and practice of gardening, that of the structure and characters of plants, and was early and practically versed in the methods of Ray and Tournefort." - Richard Pulteney, English physician and botanist
Miller had two sons who worked under him; one, Charles, became the first head of the Cambridge Botanic Garden.