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Born Edinburgh 1776; died Edinburgh 1851
Descended from East Lothian printers, Patrick Neill attended Edinburgh University though did not graduate. He joined the family firm of printers and eventually established his own firm of Neill & Co. ; the success of his company allowed him to devote much time to scientific pursuits. In 1804 he visited Orkney and Shetland and accounts of his natural history and economic observations appeared in The Scots Magazine. In 1808 he became a founder member of the Wernerian Natural History Society comprising leading lights of the Scottish scientific community as well as eminent international members. In 1809 he became first secretary of the Caledonian Horticultural Society (CHS), a position he was to hold for the next 40 years. This Society, still active today, brought together professional and amateur gardeners, academics, landowners and nurserymen. William Neill had inherited Canonmills Cottage in north Edinburgh and in its half acre garden created a ‘mini’ botanic garden with thousands of rare and unusual plants from all over the world, as well as a small menagerie. In 1813 Neill produced a report on Scottish Gardens and Orchards, the first general survey of Scottish horticulture, and in 1817 was commissioned by the CHS to examine the state of horticulture in Northern Europe involving an extensive trip through France and the Low Countries. In the 1820s he advised Edinburgh town council on the development East Princes St Gardens leading to new plantings of 27,000 trees and shrubs, though the design was subsequently wrecked by the building of the railway and Scott Monument in the 1840s. Neill was held in high regard by his fellow citizens as evidenced by his 1843 testimonial silver vase paid for by working gardeners, and the Caledonian Society’s successful growth and influence owed much to Neill’s enthusiasm and careful administration. He died in 1851 and among his charitable bequests was £500 to the Royal CHS to found a medal for a distinguished botanist or cultivator, and the same amount to the Royal Society of Edinburgh for a medal for distinguished Scottish naturalists.
Sources: Dictionary of National Biography; ‘Patrick Neill , Doyenne of Scottish Horticulture’Forbes W Robertson; (R. Desmond ‘Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturalists).
D.W.

Born Edinburgh 1799: died Glasgow 1868.
George Walker Arnott entered the University of Edinburgh aged 14 and took his MA degree in 1818, having already published learned articles on mathematics. He then studied law but abandoned it (due to a dislike of public speaking) in favour of botany, and in the early 1820s went to France to exchange views and excursions with the great French botanists, for a time working in the Paris herbaria. He became famous for his work on cryptogams. He was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1825 and in 1828 the genus Arnottia was named after him. Between 1830 and 1840 Arnott worked with Sir William Jackson Hooker building a reputation as a meticulous taxonomist. His descriptions of new plants from South America, India and Senegambia were published in various journals and he co-operated with Robert Wight in his Illustrations of Indian Botany. In 1837 the University of Aberdeen awarded him its LLD and in 1845 he was elected Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University. In 1850 he collaborated with Hooker on the sixth edition of 'British Flora'. At that time he studied and built up a collection of diatoms. Although ‘disinclined’ to publish, his obituary in the Journal of Botany notes that ‘his marvellous letters … to his numerous working correspondents’ made his scientific observations equally useful. He was also an enthusiastic curler and freemason.
Sources: DNB; Desmond's Dictionary; Jnl Bot 1868; Gard Chron 1868
by D.W.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/obituary-jimmy-ratter-tropical-botanist-devoted-study-brazils-cerrado-region-3061200

Roland Edgar Cooper was born in 1890 in Kingston-Upon-Thames, but lost both his parents by the age of four. He came to be cared for by his aunt Emma Wiedhofft who was married to William Wright Smith, eventual Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. It was this association that was to shape Cooper's career - he travelled to Calcutta with Smith in 1907 when he became in charge of the Herbarium there, travelling and collecting botanical specimens in Sikkim, Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan. In 1910, Cooper and Smith returned, and Cooper took the Horticultural course at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.
In 1913, Cooper returned to the Himalayas to collect plants for A.K. Bulley of Ness, near Liverpool. He travelled through Sikkim in 1913, Bhutan in 1914-15, and the Punjab in 1916.
In 1921, after the First World War, during which Cooper served in the Indian Army, he was appointed Superintendent of the Botanic Garden at Maymo in the Shan Hills of Burma, eventually returning to Scotland in the late 1920's for the education of his son. From 1930-1934 Cooper worked at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as the Garden Curator's assistant, taking the role of Curator (Head Gardener) himself in 1934, a post he held until his retirement in 1950. Post retirement, he and his wife Emily Bartusek moved to Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex.
During his career, Cooper became a Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, the Botanical Society of Edinburgh (now Scotland), the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Scottish Anthropological Society. He was also the vice-president of the Scottish Rock Garden Club, of which he was a founder member.

Born Carluke, Lanarkshire 1885; died Edinburgh 1967
After studying science at Heriot Watt College and drawing at Edinburgh College of Art, Adam started work at RBGE in 1903 preparing lecture illustrations for the Regius Keeper, Isaac Bayley Balfour. In 1914 he was made a permanent member of staff as assistant in charge of the studio and in 1915 promoted to the new post of Photographer and Artist, remaining in this post until his retirement in 1949. He became official artist to the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, but Adam became best known as one of the foremost landscape photographers in Scotland, illustrating publications such as Quigley’s ‘The Highlands of Scotland’, 1936, and publishing pictures regularly in the Scots Magazine, the Scotsman and Picture Post. In the later twentieth Century his mountain photographs have provided conservationists and landscape historians with a reliable historic record of the landscape and rural life. He continued to use his heavy 1908 half plate camera, printing all the photographs himself in a style difficult to replicate today and his negatives are now in the collection of St. Andrews University.
Source: DNB; Bown's '4 Gardens in 1'; Desmond's Dictionary; Fletcher & Brown's 'RBGE 1670-1970'
by D.W.
see also: https://stories.rbge.org.uk/archives/28160

Scottish surgeon and botanist, referred to as the Father of Indian botany.