Benjamin Heyne

Benjamin Heyne FLS (1770–1819) was a German surgeon, naturalist and botanist. In 1793, Benjamin Heyne joined the service of the British East India Company and in 1796 was assigned as the Madras Presidency Botanist to Samalkot.

In 1800, after the fall of Mysore, the Lalbagh botanical garden at Bangalore was appropriated by the British East India Company "as a depository for useful plants sent from different parts of the country". Dr. Benjamin Heyne, the Company’s botanist at Madras, was ordered by the Governor-General, Richard Wellesley to accompany the Surveyor, with the following instructions:

"A decided superiority must be given to useful plants over those which are merely recommended by their rarity or their beauty,... to collect with care all that is connected with the arts and manufacturers of this country, or that promises to be useful in our own; to give due attention to the timber employed in the various provinces of his route,... and to collect with particular diligence the valuable plants connected with his own immediate profession, i.e. medicine."

An important task assigned to the colonial botanical gardens was dealing with malaria, the largest obstacle to colonial expansion. Heyne was placed in charge of the Lalbagh botanical garden till 1812. He did a great deal of collecting at Coimbatore and Bangalore and compiled a large collection of plant specimens which were forwarded to London. He collected more than 350 species from the Western Ghats and more than 200 species were named by him. He sent many of his Indian botanical specimens to the German botanist Albrecht Wilhelm Roth, whose work Novae plantarum species praesertim Indiae orientali (a book of Indian flora) is largely based on Heyne's botanical specimens.

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