Thomas Drummond

Thomas Drummond. Thomas Drummond (1793–1835) was the younger brother of James Drummond, also a botanist, who got his fame in annals of Australian botany as the founder of the first Australian botanical garden and as the first Government naturalist. There is little known about Thomas Drummond’s early years, except that at the age of 21 he was called upon to run a nursery in Forfar in Scotland. In all these early years he collected plants all over Scotland and became known to the director of Kew Gardens, Sir William Jackson Hooker due to his distributions of Scottish mosses, called Musci Scotici. He also contributed his knowledge of Scottish plants to Hooker’s Flora Scotica (1821).

Hooker recommended Drummond to Sir John Franklin for a job on Franklin’s second arctic expedition (1825–27). Drummond was named assistant naturalist in charge of botany to Dr. Trip to Another World – Digitalising and Decolonising Thomas Drummond’s ‘Musci Americani’. Written by Su Liu, BA English Language and Literature student at the University of Sheffield, formerly summer intern (2023) at Amgueddfa Genedlaethol Caerdydd – National Museum Cardiff. Thomas Drummond, a Scottish naturalist, witnessed the tragedy of his accompanying Native American family – the Iroquois hunters had just lost their beloved and a newborn in the severe winter of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Yet their journey had to be continued to collect the 286 specimens in Drummond’s Musci Americani, one of the richest collections of North American mosses. ‘…the whole of the continent of North America has not been known to possess so many Mosses as Mr. Drummond has detected in this single journey.’ – Sir William J. Above is a real event in Drummond’s Sketch of a Journey to the Rocky Mountains and to the Columbia River in North America, which records his excursions during Franklin’s second land expedition. Lost stories of a distant adventure and forgotten collectors Further reading.