Thomas Andrew Knight
| Thomas Andrew Knight | |
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Thomas Andrew Knight
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| Born | 12 August 1759 Wormsley Grange, Herefordshire, England |
| Died | 11 May 1838 London, England |
| Residence | Elton Hall and Downton Castle, Herefordshire |
| Nationality | English |
| Fields | botanist |
| Author abbrev. (botany) | T.Knight |
| Children | Charlotte Knight |
Thomas Andrew Knight, FRS (1759–1838) was a horticulturalist and botanist who lived at Downton Castle, Herefordshire. He was the brother of Richard Payne Knight.
He attended Balliol College, Oxford. After graduation, he took up the study of horticulture. Attention was first called to his work in 1795 by the publication of the results of his research into the propagation of fruit trees and the diseases prevalent among them. He used 10,000 acres (4,000 ha) of land he inherited to conduct breeding of strawberries, cabbages, peas, and others. He also built an extensive greenhouse. In 1797 he published a Treatise on the Culture of the Apple and Pear, and on the Manufacture of Cider and Perry, a work which passed through several editions. He was one of the leading students of horticulture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but his personal papers disappeared after his death.
Knight performed basic physiological experiments on plants at a time when that was rare. He elucidated the effects of gravity on seedlings and how decay in fruit trees was passed on by grafting. In a way he looked back to the Reverend Stephen Hales. His goals were always strictly practical, aiming to improve useful food plants by breeding for better qualities. The 'Downton' strawberry was the ancestor of most important modern strawberries for years.
It is not widely known that he studied variation in peas and found many of the same results as Mendel, but he did not make the same imaginative leap about how these changes took place. Knight intentionally shut himself off from outside scientific influences. He refused to read anyone else's papers until Sir Joseph Banks got him to do it. They had a voluminous correspondence. All Knight's work was reported to the Royal Society of London in the Society's Transactions.
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