Thomas Ford Chipp

Thomas Ford Chipp (1 January 1886 – 28 June 1931) was an English botanist who became Assistant Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He played an important role in development of the study of ecology in the British Empire. After the war he returned to the Gold Coast and resumed his work on forest management. He published a dissertation on the ecology of the Gold Coast forests that gained him a doctoral degree from the University of London and was published as a book. He was frustrated by the destructive habit of burning forest to clear it for agricultural use and deeply concerned by the ecological impact of the growing population.

In the late autumn of 1928 the Empire Marketing Board made a grant to Kew which enabled Chipp to pay an official visit overseas. Apart from a visit by R. Good to Gebel Marra which had obtained a few specimens, Chipp was the first European botanist to investigate the mountains of this region. Among other specimens, he collected Coreopsis chippii near the summit. On his return, Chipp was faced with a huge administrative workload connected with the gardens, the Botanical Congress and a directory of botanists worldwide that he was helping to prepare. He died prematurely of a heart attack at the end of June 1931, at the age of forty four.