James Smith

James Smith (1760 – 1 January 1848) was a Scottish botanist and nurseryman. He founded the Monkwood Botanic Garden in Maybole Parish which included several thousand species of exotic and native British plants. A regular consultant of his English contemporaries, he is credited with the discovery of Primula scotica, Salix caprea pendula and several other species of plants native to Scotland. Owing to this particular interest in the flora of Scotland, Smith has been described as the "father of Scottish botany."

Biography Smith was born in 1760 in Ochiltree, Scotland. In his earlier years, he had been a student of Joseph Banks, and worked in the gardens of Stowe House and Syon House. He later became the superintendent of the London Botanic Garden of William Curtis. It was at Monkwood where Smith employed and mentored his future son-in-law, the botanist John Goldie, for whom Dyopteris goldieana is named. Passing through Monkwood on one occasion, the poet Hew Ainslie wrote in his A Pilgrimage in the Land of Burns (1820) that Smith's garden was "paradisiacal", where plants "of all nations were seated most brotherly together, drinking of the same dews, and dancing to the piping of the same breeze". left Owing to his botanical knowledge and extensive collection of plants, Smith was regularly consulted by such contemporary English botanists as William Jackson Hooker and James Edward Smith who included his information on botanical subjects in their works. As mentioned in Hooker's Flora Scotica (1821), Smith is credited with the discovery of Primula scotica, Veronica hirsuta and the Kilmarnock Weeping Willow (Salix caprea pendula).

Smith died on 1 January 1848, aged 84. His gravestone in the Ayr Auld Kirkyard (where Smith had his first garden) describes him as the "father of Scottish botany," a title derived from his particular interest in the flora of Scotland.