William Jackson Hooker

Sir William Jackson Hooker (6 July 1785 – 12 August 1865) was an English botanist and botanical illustrator, who became the first director of Kew when in 1841 it was recommended to be placed under state ownership as a botanic garden. At Kew he founded the Herbarium and enlarged the gardens and arboretum. The standard author abbreviation Hook. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.

Hooker was born and educated in Norwich. An inheritance gave him the means to travel and to devote himself to the study of natural history, particularly botany. He published his account of an expedition to Iceland in 1809, even though his notes and specimens were destroyed during his voyage home. He married Maria, the eldest daughter of the Norfolk banker Dawson Turner, in 1815, afterwards living in Halesworth for 11 years, where he established a herbarium that became renowned by botanists at the time.

He held the post of Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, where he worked with the botanist and lithographer Thomas Hopkirk and enjoyed the supportive friendship of Joseph Banks for his exploring, collecting and organising work. In 1841 he succeeded William Townsend Aiton as Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He expanded the gardens at Kew, building new glasshouses, and establishing an arboretum and a museum of economic botany. Among his publications are The British Jungermanniae (1816), Flora Scotica (1821), and Species Filicum (1846–64).

He died in 1865. His son, Joseph Dalton Hooker, succeeded him as Director of Kew Gardens.

Hooker's father Joseph Hooker was related to the Baring family and worked for them in Exeter and Norwich as a wool-stapler, trading in worsted and bombazine. He was an amateur botanist who collected succulent plants, and was, according to his grandson Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, "mainly a self-educated man and a fair German scholar". Joseph Hooker was related to the sixteenth-century historian John Hooker, and the theologian Richard Hooker.

His mother, Lydia Vincent, the daughter of James Vincent, belonged to a family of Norwich worsted weavers and artists. Her cousin, William Jackson, was William Jackson Hooker's godfather. Upon his death in 1789 William Jackson bequeathed his estate in Seasalter, Kent, to his godson, who inherited it when he was 21. Lydia Vincent's nephew, George Vincent, was one of the most talented of the Norwich School of painters.

William Jackson Hooker was born on 6 July 1785 at 71–77 Magdalen Street, Norwich. A child named William Jacson [sic] Hooker was christened by his parents Joseph and Lydia Hooker at the nonconformist Tabernacle in Norwich on 9 November 1785. He attended the Norwich Grammar School from about 1792 until his late teens, but none of the school records from the period he was there have been kept, and little is known of his schooldays. He developed an interest in entomology, reading and natural history during his boyhood.

In 1805, Hooker discovered a moss (now known as Buxbaumia aphylla) when out walking on Rackheath, north of Norwich. He visited the Norwich botanist Sir James Edward Smith to consult his Linnean collections. Smith advised the young Hooker to contact the botanist Dawson Turner about his discovery.