Leo H. Grindon

Leopold Hartley Grindon (28 March 1818 – 20 November 1904) was an English educator and botanist, and a pioneer in adult education. His plant collection and botanical drawings and writings formed a major asset of the herbarium at Manchester Museum, when it was founded in 1860.

Early life

Leopold Hartley Grindon was born in Bristol on 28 March 1818 and educated at Bristol College. He established the Bristol Philobotanical Society while still at school. He moved to Manchester at the age of 20, spending a year as an apprentice in a warehouse before becoming a cashier for John Whittaker & Company's cotton business until 1864.

Botany

Grindon, whose father was a solicitor and coroner, showed an early interest in botany and was self-taught in other areas of science, such as astronomy and geology. At the age of 13, he started collecting dried plants and by 18 he envisaged creating a herbarium of all the cultivated and wild plants found in Britain. He grew many specimens from seed and collected writings and drawings, particularly of plants that were difficult to grow or obtain in specimen form. As he put it, "I desired also to introduce every bit of printed matter referring to the plant that might come in my way, with descriptions alike of the individual species and of the Natural Orders, the uses and other particulars also have a place and seeing that Botany is wreathed also with all kinds of poetical and other human associations, everything that would illustrate these was also to go into the Herbarium so-called, which thus to be a Herbarium and a Botanical library fused into one."