Alexander Anderson
Alexander Anderson was an American inventor and botanist whose discovery and patenting of the process of "puffing" cereal grains earned him a place in history and in popular culture.

Luther Burbank
Luther Burbank was an American botanist and horticulturist who bred over 800 new varieties of plants, including the familiar Shasta daisy. Unfortunately, Burbank was also an active promoter of eugenics.

Aimo Cajander
Aimo Cajander was a Finnish botanist and professor of forestry who became Prime Minister of Finland (for the first time) in 1922.

George Carver
George Washington Carver was a renowned American agricultural researcher and educator born into slavery, who went on to head the Agricultural Department at Tuskegee Institute.

Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci is an iconic, prolific and well-known Italian scientist, artist and writer of the late 15th Century and early 16th Century. Although best known for his many other interests and accomplishments, da Vinci also had an interest in botany, both from the perspective of art and science. In addition to his exquisite illustrations of plants, da Vinci has been credited with setting out rules for phyllotaxy, the aging of trees by growth rings, and the nature of secondary growth in woody plants by addition of new wood beneath the bark.

Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, who in 1859 published On the Origin of Species, establishing the theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson, one of America's great poets, was also an amateur botanist. She prepared her own herbarium while a student at Mt. Holyoke.

Nicholas Drahos
Nick Drahos was an American wildlife and conservation biologist and educator, but perhaps remembered by most as a star Cornell University football player who was named to the All-America team in 1939-1940, and elected to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1981.

Will Geer
Will Geer (born William Aughe Ghere) was an American stage and screen actor, as well as political activist and folk singer. He had earned a Master's degree in botany at Columbia University before turning his sights toward music and acting.

David Goodall
David William Goodall was a British-born Australian plant taxonomist and plant physiologist who gained international attention when he elected assisted suicide at the age of 104 and flew to Switzerland because of legal barriers to his choice in Australia.

Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician, whose taxonomic system of binomial nomenclature is still followed today. The genus Linnaea is named for him.

Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Ukrainian-Soviet plant breeder whose goals were primarily to improve crops. He rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of his own brand of Michurinism (a neo-Lamarckian view). Supported by Joseph Stalin, Lysenko forced the dismissal or imprisonment of scientists opposing his views, and is also today generally held to some responsibility for the great famines in the U.S.S.R. and China, which disastrously adopted his agricultural improvement ideas.

Barbara McClintock
Barbara McClintock was an American cytogeneticist whose work with Zea mays led to her discovery of genetic transposition, for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983.

Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk from what is today the Czech Republic, is most well-known for his work on the genetics of pea plants. His discovery was later the basis for what we now call Mendelian Genetics. After Darwin, Mendel is arguably the most famous botanist in history.

Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter was a well-known English artist and children's author as well as a naturalist and illustrator of fungi.

Joseph Rhine
Joseph Banks Rhine was an American plant physiologist who obtained a Masters degree and Ph.D. in botany, but later devoted his career to research in parapsychology. He is credited with founding the field of parasychology.

Louisa E. Rhine
Louisa Ella Rhine was an American botanist but perhaps best known as "the first lady of parapsychology."

Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks was an American physician, medical researcher and popular author who had an intense avocation in botany, particularly cycads and ferns. He collaborated with botanists at the New York Botanical Garden and accompanied them on field trips, one of which with Robbin Moran is documented in his book Oaxaca Journal.

Henry Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, plant collector, philosopher, and writer best known for his publications Walden (1854) and Civil Disobedience (1848).