Garden plants and their hunters – Joseph Banks

Joseph Banks was born in 1743 and attended Oxford University. While he was still a student he inherited a large fortune which allowed him to travel in 1766 to Newfoundland and Labrador, collecting plants.

In 1768 he joined a Royal Society expedition, led by Captain James Cook, to explore the South Pacific. This famous expedition circumnavigated the globe and visited South America, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Java. During the years they were away, Banks collected an enormous number of specimens – including the first Banksia specimens. He was primarily interested in discovering and cultivating plants that could be used for food or manufacturing purposes and be introduced into other countries and this scientific focus led to him becoming the President of the Royal Society in 1778. Later he was to as director of the Royal Botanic Gardens.

In 1793 his name was given to the Banks Islands, a volcanic group of islands near Vanuatu in the Pacific. These were explored and named by Captain Bligh: and they were given Banks’s name because Banks had helped arrange a previous expedition of Bligh's on HMS Bounty, the very one, in fact that ended in the famous mutiny. He is best known botanically for bring back to England the first specimen of the Banksias which bear his name – a genus of Australian plants with a characteristic flower spike, known as an inflorescence. The flower spike, ranging from white through yellow to red in colour, consists of a central woody axis with a furry coating; it is generally held erect, but hangs down in a few species and may contain up to 6,000 flowers.

Banksia photograph by jmcgross, used under a creative commons attribution licence

Plant Hunters