Thomas Moore (botanist)
British gardener and botanist (1821–1887)
Thomas Moore (21 May 1821 – 1 January 1887) was a British gardener and botanist. An expert on ferns and fern allies from the British Isles, he served as Curator of the Society of Apothecaries Garden from 1848 to 1887. In 1855, Moore authored The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland. The standard author abbreviation T.Moore is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Life
He was born at Stoke, near Guildford, Surrey, on 21 May 1821.
He was brought up as a gardener, and was employed at Fraser's Lee Bridge Nursery, and subsequently, under Robert Marnock, in the laying out of the Regent's Park gardens.
In 1848, by the influence of Dr. John Lindley, he was appointed curator of the Apothecaries' Company's Garden at Chelsea, in succession to Robert Fortune, an appointment which gave him leisure for other work.
Under Moore's tenure during the period of so-called "pteridomania", the garden increased the number of fern species cultivated there by fifty percent and was renamed the Chelsea Physic Garden in 1875. The Thomas Moore Fernery was built in 1907 on the site of his original garden and now contains a display of the varieties of ferns described and cultivated by Moore and popular during the Victorian era.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Moore (botanist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.