Nathaniel Lord Britton records

Nathaniel Lord Britton (1857-1934) was a botanist, taxonomist, and first Director-in-Chief of the New York Botanical Garden. He was born on 15 January 1857 at New Dorp, Staten Island, New York son of Jasper Alexander Hamilton Britton and Harriet Lord Turner. In 1875 Britton entered the Columbia College School of Mines to study geology under John Strong Newberry. Upon graduation in 1879 he became assistant instructor under Newberry whose position he assumed in 1886. He published his Ph.D. thesis A Preliminary Catalogue of the Flora of New Jersey in 1881.

Dr. Britton and his friend Charles Hollick worked as field assistants with the Geological Survey of New Jersey (1879-84), traveling to the Wyoming Territory to collect fossils. They later published The Flora of Richmond County, New York based on botanical investigation of Staten Island. During this period Dr. Britton and the bryologist Elizabeth Gertrude Knight became leading members of New York City's Torrey Botanical Club. Their marriage in August 1885 was grounded in mutual botanical interests and career aspirations. Both worked at the forefront of a movement to establish a botanical garden in New York City. The Torrey Botanical Club circulated a public appeal in 1889 to establish a botanic garden and two years later by an act of the New York State legislature; the New York Botanical Garden was founded.

Dr. Britton, as Professor of Geology & Botany at Columbia University, curated its herbarium and botanical library, resigning in 1895 to become the Garden's first Director-in-Chief. By agreement with Columbia, the collections followed him. During the Garden's first decade he worked assiduously to build its scientific program yet remained deeply involved in a personal mission to establish the "American Code" of botanical nomenclature. From 1896 to 1898 he published the landmark floristic study An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States and Canada. Financed by Judge Addison Brown, the work became known as the Britton & Brown Illustrated Flora.

In 1902 the Brittons began the first of their annual botanical excursions to the Caribbean. Dr. Britton's investigation of tropical flora culminated in the Scientific Survey of Puerto Rico through the auspices of the NYBG and New York Academy of Sciences and published in eight parts through the 1920s. From 1906 he collaborated with Joseph Nelson Rose of the Carnegie Institute on The Cactaceae, a four-volume work published in 1924. Other monographs included The Flora of Bermuda (1918) and The Bahama Flora (1920) with Charles F. Millspaugh.

As Director of the Garden, Britton directed botanical research throughout North America and the West Indies, founded its public education and horticulture programs, launched several serial publications, and built alliances and collaborations with scientific organizations throughout the United States, especially in New York City. In particular, he established a consortium of scientific societies known as The Scientific Alliance of New York that flourished through the 1890s until 1907. His own botanical research and publication proceeded apace through the formative years of the institution. Dr. Britton retired from the Garden in 1929 and spent his final years writing a Puerto Rican flora (Flora Borinquena) left unfinished at his death. His wife Elizabeth died in February 1934, an emotional shock from which he never recovered. Dr. Britton soon followed her in death in June of that year.