Alexander Anderson (botanist)

Anderson studied at the University of Edinburgh. Fellow Aberdonian William Forsyth briefly employed him at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, prior to Anderson's emigration to New York in 1774, where he stayed with his brother John, a printer.[1]

Beginning in 1785, Anderson served as one of the first two superintendent curators of the St Vincent botanic garden, along with George Young. Anderson worked at the Botanic Garden for over 25 years, during which he conducted travels throughout the Guianas, St. Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago, and discovered more than 100 varieties of Caribbean plants new to botanical science. During his tenure the number of species at the garden increased from 348 to over 3,000.[2] He was a correspondent of Sir Joseph Banks, through whom he contributed to the Royal Society in 1789 an account of a bituminous lake on St. Vincent, which was afterwards published in the Philosophical Transactions for that year.

In January 1791 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, proposed by Daniel Rutherford, John Walker and William Wright.[3] In the same year he went into Guiana on a botanising expedition; the plants he obtained being sent to Banks, are now in the herbarium of the British Museum. He was also elected to the American Philosophical Society in that year.[4]

The Society of Arts voted him a silver medal in 1798 for a paper upon the plants in the garden at St Vincent. He contemplated the production of a flora of the Caribbean islands, some sheets of which he sent to Banks; but this project was never carried out. He resigned his post in July 1811, and died on 8 September in the same year (the Royal Society of Edinburgh gives his date of death as 10 May 1811).

Anderson was succeeded as superintendent by his friend, the surgeon William Lochhead.

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Anderson, Alexander (d.1811)". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.