John Gould Veitch (April 1839 – 13 August 1870) was a British horticulturist and traveller, one of the first

Victorian Victorian or Victorians may refer to: 19th century * Victorian era, British history during Queen Victoria's 19th-century reign ** Victorian architecture ** Victorian house ** Victorian decorative arts ** Victorian fashion ** Victorian literature ...

plant hunters to visit Japan. A great-grandson of John Veitch, the founder of the Veitch horticulture dynasty, he also visited the Philippines, Australia, Fiji, and other Polynesian islands. He brought back a number of the glasshouse plants in vogue at the time, such as '' Acalyphas'', '' Cordylines'', ''

Codiaeum ''Codiaeum'' is a genus of plants under the family Euphorbiaceae Euphorbiaceae, the spurge family, is a large family of flowering plants. In English, they are also commonly called euphorbias, which is also the name of a genus in the family. ...

s'' (Crotons) and '' Dracaenas'', and, from Fiji, a palm of a new genus later named after him, '' Veitchia joannis''. The Veitch family name is honoured by hundreds of plant names, including the genus '' Veitchia''. The Veitch nursery introduced 232 orchids, some 500 greenhouse plants, 118 exotic ferns, about 50 conifers, 153 deciduous trees, 72 evergreen and climbing shrubs, 122 herbaceous and 37 bulbous plants from various corners of the globe. In Japan, he came across the eminent plant collector Robert Fortune, and their competing collections returned to England on the same ship. For example, both men claimed discovery of a species of ''

Chamaecyparis pisifera ''Chamaecyparis pisifera'' (Sawara cypress or Sawara ja, サワラ , translit=Sawara) is a species of false cypress, native to central and southern Japan, on the islands of Honshū and Kyūshū.Farjon, A. (2005). ''Monograph of Cupressaceae and ...

''. He was married to Jane Hodge soon after his return to England in 1866 and fathered two sons, James Herbert Veitch (1868 – 1907) and John Gould Veitch, Jr. (1869 – 1914) before dying of tuberculosis at the age of 31.

References

External links

"John Gould Veitch 1839 - 1870", by Ian Edwards, The Tropical Garden Society of Sydney

{{DEFAULTSORT:Veitch, John Gould English botanists English horticulturists 1839 births 1870 deaths Businesspeople from Exeter Veitch Nurseries Plant collectors