John Davidson (botanist)
John Davidson was a notable Scottish-Canadian botanist.Biography
He was born in Aberdeen, Scotland.
He worked at the University of Aberdeen from 1893 to 1911. He later moved to Canada in the hopes of securing a professorship at the soon to be established University of British Columbia. Instead, he was appointed the first Provincial Botanist of British Columbia. Davidson established a herbarium on West Pender Street, Vancouver, and a botanical garden near New Westminster, at Coquitlam. This collection was moved to the UBC in 1916 where it became the UBC Botanical Garden. This move is often described as having involved the transfer of 25,000 plants, though this figure is an exaggeration. Even if Davidson and his staff transferred two thousand plants, the feat would still have been extraordinary. As a UBC faculty member in Botany from 1916 to 1948 Davidson was instrumental in developing botany teaching at the University.
He also founded the
