Thomas Johnson (botanist)

Thomas Johnson
Title page of Johnson's 1633 edition of Gerard's Herball
Born	1595–1600 Selby, Yorkshire, England
Died	1644 Hampshire
Occupation	apothecary, botanist
Nationality	English
Notable works	John Gerard's Herball, expanded

Thomas Johnson (died 1644) was an English botanist, and a royalist colonel in the English Civil War. He has been called the "father of British field botany".

Johnson was born at Selby in Yorkshire between 1595 and 1600. He seems to have received a good education, and to have become an apothecary in London by 1626. Possibly before that he was living in Lincolnshire (Gerard, Herball, ed. 1633, p. 74). In 1629 he was in business on Snow Hill, city of London, where he had a physic-garden, and had become a prominent member of the Apothecaries' Company.

On the outbreak of the civil war Johnson joined the royalists, and, partly for his learning, partly no doubt for his loyalty, was made a Bachelor of physic by the University of Oxford in 1642, and M.D. on 9 May 1643. Johnson took an active part in the defence of Basing House, becoming lieutenant-colonel to Sir Marmaduke Rawdon, the governor, and on 14 September 1644, during a skirmish with a detachment of Sir William Waller's troops under Colonel Richard Norton, he received a shot in the shoulder, "whereby contracting a feaver, he died a fortnight after" (Siege of Basing Castle, 1644).

His first work was a short account of one of the herborising excursions which the company was in the habit of undertaking. This, the first local catalogue of plants published in England, was entitled "Iter Plantarum Investigationis ergo susceptum a decem Sociis in Agrum Cantianum, anno Dom. 1629, Julii 13" (London, 1629), and an appendix of three pages is headed "Ericetum Hamstedianum seu Plantarum ibi crescentium observatio habita anno eodem 1 Augusti." Johnson seems (Herball, p. 450) to have been in Kent in 1626, and to have revisited both that county and Hampstead Heath, as in 1632 he published an enlarged edition of both lists. The plants are named in them according to Lobel, Dodoens, and Gerard. Anna Pavord provides an account of this expedition in her book, The Naming of Names following Gilmour's translation (Gilmour 1972), stating that he was inspired in his explorations by one of the first descriptions of botanical exploration, that of Ulysse Aldrovandi (1557).