Richard Warner (botanist)

Richard Warner (c. 1711-13 – 11 April 1775) was an English botanist and literary scholar.

He was born in London, probably in 1713, the third son of John Warner, a goldsmith and banker, in business in The Strand near Temple Bar. John Warner, sheriff of London in 1640, and lord mayor in 1648, in which year he was knighted, was probably Richard Warner's great-grandfather. John Warner, Richard's father, was a friend of Gilbert Burnet; he and his son Robert, a barrister, purchased property in Clerkenwell, comprising what was afterwards Little Warner Street, Cold Bath Square, Great and Little Bath Streets, etc. John Warner seems to have died about 1721 or 1722, and his widow then purchased Harts, an estate at Woodford, Essex, which, on her death in 1743, she left to her son Richard.

Richard Warner entered Wadham College, Oxford, in July 1730, and graduated B.A. in 1734. He had chambers in Lincoln's Inn; but lived mainly at Woodford where he maintained a botanical garden, and cultivated exotic plants.

In 1748 Warner received a visit from Pehr Kalm, the disciple of Linnæus, then on his way to North America. Warner took Kalm to London, to Peter Collinson's garden at Peckham, to visit Philip Miller in Chelsea, and to see the aging Sir Hans Sloane. Warner then received from the Cape of Good Hope the so-called Cape jasmine (Gardenia jasminoides), which flowered in his hothouse. John Ellis in a letter to Linnæus dated 21 July 1758, proposed should be called Warneria; Warner, however, objected, and it was named Gardenia. Miller dedicated a genus to him in 1760, but it had been given the name Hydrastis by Linnæus in the previous year.

...
Wikipedia