Francis masson biography

Masson was born in Aberdeen.
Little is known of Masson's early life, except that he was born in Aberdeen in 1741.
Banks was writing of Francis Masson (1741–1805), a Scottish gardener and Kew Garden's first official plant hunter.

•

MASSON, FRANCIS, botanist; b. August 1741 in Aberdeen, Scotland; d., probably unmarried, 23 Dec. 1805 in Montreal, Lower Canada.

Francis Masson was appointed under-gardener at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (London), England, in 1771. Until that time, Kew Gardens had received plants and seeds from a variety of persons, but William Aiton, the director, wished the institution to undertake its own gathering of specimens; Masson became its first official collector. In 1772 he was sent aboard the Resolution with Captain James Cook* to the Cape of Good Hope. Between that year and 1774 he made three long excursions into the interior of southern Africa to explore for plants. He returned to England in 1775, and the following year he published an account of his journeys in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. He began corresponding with Carl Linnaeus, the eminent Swedish naturalist, whom he idolized and who, at Masson’s request, named a species of asphodel massonia. In May 1776 Masson was sent to the Azores, the Canary Islands, Made

•

Francis Masson

Scottish botanist

Francis Masson (August 1741 – 23 December 1805) was a Scottishbotanist and gardener, and Kew Gardens’ first plant hunter.^[1]

Life

Masson was born in Aberdeen.

In the 1760s, he went to work at Kew Gardens as an under-gardener. Masson was the first plant collector to be sent abroad by the newly appointed director Sir Joseph Banks; he sailed with James Cook on HMS Resolution to South Africa, landing in October 1772. Masson stayed until 1775, during which time he sent back to England over 500 species of plant.

In 1776,^[2] Banks sent Masson abroad again, this time to Madeira, Canary Islands, the Azores and the Antilles. Whilst in Grenada, Masson was captured and imprisoned by the French, a traumatic experience which haunted him for the rest of his life. Although he was eventually released, his collections deteriorated during the delay in securing a passage home, and a hurricane in St. Lucia destroyed almost all of what little had survived. Returning to Kew, Masson found the gardening life tedious by comp

•

Aberdeen

Francis Masson lived from August 1741 to 23 December 1805. He was a gardener who became Kew Gardens' first plant hunter. The wider picture in Scotland at the time is set out in our Historical Timeline.

Francis Masson was born in Aberdeen. He started his working life as a junior gardener, but in 1760 at the age of 19 he travelled to London to become an under-gardener at Kew Gardens. In 1772 he wa seen as sufficiently knowledgable to stand in for the eminent plant collector and botanist Joseph Banks on Captain Cook's second great voyage of exploration, on board HMS Resolution. This set sail from Britain on 13 May 1772 and arrived in South Africa on 30 October 1772.

Masson immediately embarked on a two month expedition into the interior, taking in the Stellenbosch and the Hottentot Holland Mountains. Sometimes working with Swedish Botanist Carl Thunberg and sometimes alone, Masson spent amost three years searching out new species of plants in South Africa. By the time he returned to Kew in 1775 he had