Sir William Jackson Hooker was one of the most significant botanists of the nineteenth century. Having been encouraged to embrace his passion for natural history by his father, as a young man, Hooker was under the patronage of Sir James Edward Smith, who owned the herbarium and library of the famed Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, and the banker, bibliophile and botanist Dawson Turner. In 1806, Turner introduced Hooker to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society.

In 1820, with Banks’s recommendation, Hooker was appointed regius professor of botany at Glasgow University. While Glasgow did maintain a small botanic garden, Hooker quickly set about giving the university a reputation for botanical science. He gave lectures and took his students on field trips so that they could observe and study plants in their natural habitats. This book, Flora Scotica is his 1821 guide to the plants found in Scotland. In 1835, Hooker received a knighthood from William IV for his work.
By the time he left Glasgow to become the first full-time director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew in 1841, the university boasted over 100 botany students and a new botanic garden containing around 20,000 plants.