Philip Miller

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Philip Miller (1691 - December 18, 1771) was a botanist of Scottish descent.

Miller was chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden from 1721 until shortly before his death. He wrote The Gardener's and Florists Dictionary or a Complete System of Horticulture (1724) and The Gardener's Dictionary containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen Fruit and Flower Garden, which first appeared in 1731 in an impressive folio and passed through numerous expanding editions.^[1]

Miller corresponded with other botanists, and obtained plants from all over the world, many of which he cultivated for the first time in England. His knowledge of living plants was unsurpassed in breadth in his lifetime.^[2] He trained William Aiton, who later became head gardener at Kew, and William Forsyth, after whom Forsythia was named.

Miller was reluctant to use the new binomial nomenclature of Carolus Linnaeus, preferring the classifications of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and John Ray at first. The conservative Scot actually retained a number of pre-Linnaean binomial signifiers discarded by Linnaeus but which have been retained by modern botantists. He only fully changed to the Linnaean system in the edition of The Gardener's Dictionary of 1768, though he had already described some genera, such as Larix and Vanilla, validly under the Linnaean system earlier, in the fourth edition (1754).^[3]

Miller sent the first long-strand cotton seeds, which he had developed, to the new British colony of Georgia in 1733. They were first planted on Sea Island, off the coast of Georgia, and hence derived the name of the finest cotton.

The standard author abbreviation Mill. is applied to species he described.

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