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Born Edinburgh 1725; died Edinburgh 1786
John Hope read medicine at Edinburgh University and studied botany in Paris. He was awarded an MD at Glasgow University in 1750 and in 1762 was elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. He was appointed physician to the Royal Infirmary and was active in inducing the town council to improve the sanitation of the city. Hope was a key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, being a foundation fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and, with David Hume, Adam Smith, Allan Ramsay and others, a founder in 1754 of the Select Society. His intellectual passion was botany. In 1761 he became professor of botany and materia medica and also secured a life appointment as the King’s Botanist for Scotland and superintendent of the Royal Garden at Holyrood, Edinburgh. Using family influence, Hope secured Crown funding, to endow a new botanical garden to replace the polluted Royal Abbey Garden and the Town Garden at Trinity Hospital. He moved the rarer plants to a 5 acre site on Leith Walk and this became the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh with greenhouses, ponds and groves arranged on botanical rather than medical principles. In 1763-4 he organised the first British syndicate for importing plant material, especially from North America and he toured English gardens to gather more. Hope himself was an expert plant physiologist, using experimental demonstrations to teach botany, and had a strong interest in systematic botany encouraging his students to explore the flora of Scotland. It was through his advocacy that Linnean teaching gained a hold in Britain. His students became part of an expanding network of plant collectors and one of Hope’s important contributions to science was the creation of an influential school of botanists with international reach.
Sources: Dictionary of National Biography; HR Fletcher and WH Brown ‘The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 1670-1970’; (R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists); (Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’)
D.W.

Hughes worked on Plasmodiophora brassicae / Clubroot disease at the College of Agriculture (East Coast). He was Treasurer of the Botanical Society of Scotland from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s.

The Scottish botanist, filmmaker, author, poet, painter and arctic explorer Isobel Wylie Hutchison was born in 1889 at the family home of Carlowrie in West Lothian. As a youngster she became a self taught plant collector and naturalist enjoying solitary walks in the countryside. She longed to travel and amongst many journeys, travelled to the Holy Land by herself in 1923, before making four major expeditions north to the Arctic between 1927 and 1936, to Greenland, Alaska, Arctic Canada and the Aleutian Islands where she collected plants, took photographs and made films. She died in 1982.

Born 1941

After taking a BSc and PhD at the University of Hull, David Ingram was appointed research fellow in the botany department at Glasgow University in 1966, before moving to Cambridge in 1969 where he became first a lecturer in 1974 then, in 1988, reader in plant pathology; he was also Fellow, Tutor and Director of Studies in Biology at Downing College. In 1990 he was appointed Regius Keeper at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, a post he held until 1998. During his time as Keeper David Ingram initiated and oversaw a wealth of dynamic changes in the Garden. His period of office saw the founding of a new commercial arm – the Botanics Trading Company (BTC), and the setting up of the Friends of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. He reemphasised the pre-eminence of plant science, establishing new Molecular and Ultrastructure research laboratories and established a Scientific Advisory Group to provide international research links. His enthusiasm for education led to the creation of new courses in both Horticulture (HND Plantsmanship) and Science (MSc Biodiversity & Taxonomy of Plants) the latter a joint course with the University of Edinburgh, and fuelled expansion in the public face of the four gardens. David Ingram was also passionate about teaching young people the importance of plant science in a dynamic new way, and helped to set up the Science and Plants for Schools (SAPS) initiative which enables active experimentation in the classroom. Since his retirement from the Garden in 1998 he has been advisor to the University of Edinburgh on public engagement with science, has served on many related trusts, boards and panels, and has contributed to a range of publications on plant pathology, plant tissue and botany and his wider interests in culture and the history of art.
Sources: Who’s Who 2015; Deni Bown, ‘4 Gardens in One’; foyer panel.
D.W.

Born China 1924; died 1995
Although born in China, David Irvine returned to the Shetland Islands as a baby and was educated in Lerwick. He served in the RAF during the Second World War and in 1947 entered St Andrews University to read botany, staying on to take a PhD on the ecology of a single rock pool. During this period he became a founder member of the British Phycological (the scientific study of algae) Society. In 1954 he was appointed a Demonstrator in Agricultural Botany at the University of Cambridge where he stayed until 1958. He then spent 2 years as a research assistant at the University of Illinois contributing to the ‘Index Nominum Algarum’, an index of the published names of algae. In 1961 he returned to Britain as senior lecturer in the Department of Biology and Geology at the Polytechnic of North London where he stayed until his retirement in 1984. Although dedicating most of his academic life to the study of seaweeds in the north eastern Atlantic, David Irvine was an accomplished field biologist and natural historian with a wide range of interests. He led a number of field trips to study seaweeds and marine algae around Lundy Island, Sullom Voe and the Faroes. An avid collector, he bequeathed his herbarium and reprint collection to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
Source: obituary, The Phycologist 1996 http://www.brphycsoc.org/documents/phycologist/The%20Phycologist%20No.%2044%20August%201996.pdf

Secretary of the Linnean Society and compiler of Index Kewensis.