Thomas Drummond

Thomas Drummond

Name

Birth date: 1793

Baptism: 8 April 1793

Birth Place: Inverarity, Angus, Scotland

Date of Death: 1835

Place of Death: Havana, Cuba

Parents

Father: Thomas Drummond, Gardener at Fotherinham estate

Mother: Elizabeth Nicoll

Marriage: at Forfar in 1820 - Isobel Mungo born 1795/6 in Arbroath. Daughter of John Mungo (1771/2 ->1851) a gardener at Glamis, and Ann(e) Anderson.

Children:

Ann - married Andrew Rough a farmer at Glamis James
Isabella

Occupation: Field-bryologist; well-known collector of North American plants.

Honours and Awards:

Career:

As a youngster would have worked with his father on the estate at Fothringham, but in 1814 at the age of twenty Thomas took over the management of the late George Don’s nursery at Doo Hillock, Forfar. He managed Doo Hillock for 10 years.

In 1828 - after his 2 year expedition to the Arctic - he and his family moved to Ireland to become the first Curator of the Belfast Botanic and Horticultural Society's new botanical Garden. He fell out with the management there and returned to Scotland in 1830.

Following this move he sailed to North America and Canada, collecting many plants, seeds and birds, especially in Louisiana and Texas.

Travel:

In 1825 he sailed as assistant naturalist on a 2 year expedition to the Arctic, returning in October 1827.

1830 - North SAmerica and Canada, including Louisiana and Texas.

Publications:

Drummond produced exsiccatae of mosses as Musci Scotici (1824-5). Ulster Museum, Belfast has three volumes of Musci Scotici, which include specimens from the north of Ireland. Drummond prepared this collection for the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society.

Contributed information for William Jackson Hooker’s Flora Scotica (1821).

Other Notes:

His plants are at the Natural History Museum in London, at Kew, and Oxford.

His letters are at Kew.

References, Sources/Links, Family Trees etc.

Thomas Drummond, naturalist, was born in Scotland, probably in the county of Angus, around 1790. Little is known of his formal study of botany; he was perhaps encouraged in his scientific interests by an older brother who at one time was director of the Botanical Gardens at Cork, Ireland. In 1825, upon the recommendation of the eminent botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker, Drummond accompanied Sir John Franklin's second overland expedition to Arctic America.

As assistant naturalist, he was assigned to make botanical explorations of the mountains of western Canada, where for two years he collected bird and plant specimens. In 1830 he made a second trip to America, this time to collect specimens from the western and southern United States. While in Missouri he learned of the work Jean Louis Berlandier was doing in Texas, and in March 1833 he arrived at Velasco to begin his collecting work in that area. Despite the great floods of the spring and summer of 1833 and sickness from both cholera and diarrhea, Drummond spent twenty-one months working the area between Galveston Island and the Edwards Plateau, especially along the Brazos, Colorado, and Guadalupe rivers. His collections were the first made in Texas that were extensivelydistributed among the museums and scientific institutions of the world. He collected 750 species of plants and 150 specimens of birds, a feat that stimulated the later studies of suchbotanical collectors as Ferdinand Jacob Lindheimer and Charles Wright.

Drummond had hoped to make a complete botanical survey of Texas, but he died in Havana, Cuba, in March 1835, while making a collecting tour of that island.