Philip MillerFRS (1691 – 18 December 1771) was an Englishbotanist and gardener of Scottish descent. Miller was chief gardener at theChelsea Physic Garden for nearly 50 years from 1722, and wrote the highly popularThe Gardeners Dictionary.[1]
Born inDeptford or Greenwich,[2] Miller was chief gardener at theChelsea Physic Garden from 1722[3] until he was pressured to retire shortly before his death. According to the botanistPeter Collinson, who visited thephysic garden in July 1764 and recorded his observation in hiscommonplace books, Miller "has raised the reputation of the Chelsea Garden so much that it excels all the gardens of Europe for its amazing variety of plants of all orders and classes and from all climates..."[4] He wroteThe Gardener's and Florists Dictionary or a Complete System of Horticulture (1724) andThe Gardener's Dictionary containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen Fruit and Flower Garden, which first appeared in 1731 in an impressivefolio and passed through eight expanding editions in his lifetime and was translated into Dutch byJob Baster.[a]
Miller corresponded with other botanists, and obtained plants from all over the world, many of which he cultivated for the first time in England and is credited as their introducer. His knowledge of living plants, for which he was elected aFellow of the Royal Society, was unsurpassed in breadth in his lifetime.[5] He trainedWilliam Aiton, who later became head gardener atKew, andWilliam Forsyth, after whomForsythia was named. TheDuke of Bedford contracted him to supervise the pruning of fruit trees atWoburn Abbey and the care of his prized collection of American trees, especially evergreens, which were grown from seeds that, on Miller's suggestion, had been sent in barrels fromPennsylvania, where they had been collected byJohn Bartram.[6] Through a consortium of sixty subscribers, 1733–66, the contents of Bartram's boxes introduced such American trees asAbies balsamea andPinus rigida into English gardens.
Miller was reluctant to use the newbinomial nomenclature ofCarl Linnaeus, preferring the classifications ofJoseph Pitton de Tournefort andJohn Ray at first. Linnaeus, nevertheless, applauded Miller'sGardeners Dictionary,[7] The conservative Scot actually retained a number of pre-Linnaean binomial signifiers discarded by Linnaeus but which have been retained by modern botanists. He only fully changed to the Linnaean system in the edition ofThe Gardeners Dictionary of 1768, though he had already described some genera, such asLarix andVanilla, validly under the Linnaean system earlier, in the fourth edition (1754).[b]
Miller sent the first long-strand cotton seeds, which he had developed, to the new British Americancolony of Georgia in 1733. They were first planted onSea Island, off the coast of Georgia, and hence derived the name of the finest cotton,Sea Island Cotton.
The presumed portrait, engraved by C.J. Maillet and affixed to the posthumous French edition of Miller'sGardeners Dictionary, 1787, shows the wrong Miller,John Frederick Miller, son of the London-basedNuremberg artistJohann Sebastian Müller.[c] No authentic portrait is known.
Miller's two sons worked under him; one, Charles, became the first head of theCambridge Botanic Garden.
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