John Hutchinson (botanist)

Born in Blindburn, Wark on Tyne, Northumberland, England, he received his horticultural training in Northumberland and Durham and was appointed a student gardener at Kew in 1904. His taxonomic and drawing skills were soon noticed and resulted in his being appointed to the Herbarium in 1905. He moved from assistant in the Indian section to assistant for Tropical Africa, returning to Indian botany from 1915 to 1919, and from then on was in charge of the African section until 1936 when he was appointed Keeper of the Museums of Botany at Kew. He retired in 1948 but continued working on the phylogeny of flowering plants and publishing two parts of The Genera of Flowering Plants.

John Hutchinson proposed a radical revision of the angiosperm classification systems devised by Joseph Dalton Hooker and that of Adolf Engler and Karl Anton Eugen Prantl which had become widely accepted during the 20th century. At its simplest, his system suggested two main divisions of angiosperms, herbaceous and woody.

Hutchinson made two extended collecting trips to South Africa, which were recounted in great detail in A Botanist in Southern Africa.^[2] His first visit was from August 1928 to April 1929, and the second from June 1930 to September 1930 on which occasion the expedition travelled north as far as Lake Tanganyika.

• He was awarded an honorary degree of LL.D. by University of St Andrews in 1934.
• Awarded Veitch Memorial Medal in 1937.
• Awarded the Victoria Medal (horticulture) in 1944 for outstanding contributions to horticulture.
• Awarded Linnaean Gold Medal in 1968.
• He was awarded the Linnean Society of London's Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958.
• He was elected Honorary Fellow of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) in 1965^[6]
• He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1947
• Awarded O.B.E. shortly before his death
• Commemorated in the genus Hutchinsonia Robyns.

Hutchinson was married and had two sons and three daughters, one of whom lived in South Africa. He spent his leisure time roaming the English countryside with his wife in a caravan drawing wild flowers.

At his funeral a wreath largely made of South African flowers was sent by his colleagues at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.

Hutchinson arrived in Table Bay and spent the first few weeks collecting in and around Cape Town and Table Mountain, with short trips further afield. His first lengthy trip was to Namaqualand and Bushmanland with fellow botanist and succulent specialist, Neville Stuart Pillans. Back in Cape Town he purchased a small Citroën car and set off on 30 October in the company of Rudolf Marloth, who left them at Barrydale, and Jan Gillett, the son of Arthur Gillett at the University of Oxford (one of the founders of Oxfam). On this occasion their route followed the southern Cape coast as far as Port Elizabeth. Here Gillett's place was taken by Robert Allen Dyer and the route veered inland to Grahamstown and Katberg, then back to the coast, visiting Butterworth, Port St Johns, Kokstad, Pietermaritzburg and Durban. From here Hutchinson travelled on his own and in Pretoria joined up with General Smuts, who was a keen and knowledgeable botanist, to the far northern Transvaal to explore Lake Fundudzi, sacred to the Venda people.

Having met Hutchinson on his previous visit to South Africa, General Smuts invited him to join a party consisting of Margaret Clark Gillett with two of her sons, Jan and Anthony, on a trip to Lake Tanganyika. They set off from Irene on 28 June 1930 in a convoy of seven vehicles and were joined at Beit Bridge by Illtyd Buller Pole-Evans. They collected all the way to Lake Tanganyika and then retraced their route to Broken Hill, where Hutchinson boarded a goods train to Elizabethville (Lubumbashi). On his return to Pretoria, and with time in hand, he set off on a trip to the Soutpansberg with Jan Gillett. Then followed a week in the Drakensberg, climbing to the top of Mont-aux-Sources with two fellow botanists, Ms. Verdoorn and Ms. Forbes. A final flurry of collecting at Botha's Hill near Durban, and Port Elizabeth, saw the end of a fruitful visit.

• Hutchinson system