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Richard Spruce (10 September 1817 – 28 December 1893) was an English botanist specializing in bryology. One of the great Victorian era botanical Exploration, Spruce spent 15 years exploring the Amazon River from the Andes to its mouth, and was one of the very first Europeans to observe many of the places where he collected specimens.Pearson, M. Richard Spruce: Naturalist and Explorer. Hudson History, Settle, Yorkshire. 2004. Spruce discovered and named a number of new plant species, and corresponded with some of the leading botanists of the nineteenth century.
Spruce started his botanical collecting in Yorkshire about 1833. In 1834, at age 16, he drew up a neatly written list of all of the plants he had found on trips around Ganthorpe, focusing on bryophytes. Arranged alphabetically and containing 403 species, the gathering and naming was Spruce's first major contribution to local botany. Three years later he had drawn up a "List of the Flora of the Malton District" containing 485 species of . Several of Spruce's localities for the rarer plants are given in Henry Baines's Flora of Yorkshire, published in 1840.
In 1842 Spruce visited Thomas Taylor, an Irish botanist who shared his interest in bryophytes. In 1844 his paper on "The moss and Marchantiophyta of Teesdale", the result of a three-week excursion, showed his skill at locating and identifying rare species. In Baines's Flora of Yorkshire only four mosses were recorded from Teesdale. Spruce increased the record to 167 mosses and 41 hepaticae, of which six mosses and one Jungermanniales were new to Britain.
In April, 1845, he published in the London Journal of Botany descriptions of 23 new British mosses, about half of which he had discovered himself. That year he also published his "List of the Musci and Hepaticae of Yorkshire" in The Phytologist. The list included 48 mosses new to the English flora and a further 33 new to Yorkshire.
Spruce came to the attention of William Jackson Hooker, the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and was recommended for a collecting expedition to the Pyrenees, which he undertook in 1845–1846. In 1846 he published "Notes on the Botany of the Pyrenees" and followed it with a more technical article, "The Musci and Hepaticae of the Pyrenees", published in 1849. Spruce issued exsiccata-like series, among others the work Musci Pyrenaici, quos in Pyrenaeis centralibus occidentalibusque, nec non in agro Syrtico, A. D. 1845-6. Decerpsit Rich. Spruce (1847).Triebel, D. & Scholz, P. 2001–2024 IndExs – Index of Exsiccatae. Botanische Staatssammlung München: http://indexs.botanischestaatssammlung.de. – München, Germany.
The plants and objects collected by Spruce from 1849 to 1864 (mostly in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru) form an important botanical, historical and ethnological resource, and have been indexed at the New York Botanical Garden, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, at Trinity College Dublin, and at the University of Manchester.Seaward, M. R. D. and S. M. D. Fitzgerald. (eds.) Richard Spruce (1817-1893): Botanist and Explorer. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 1996. Towards the end of his expedition through South America, Spruce studied indigenous cultivation of cinchona in the Andes of Peru, then successfully exported seeds and young plants as requested by the government of India. The plant was cultivated to produce quinine, a drug used to prevent malaria.
He was described as the personal hero of Richard Evans Schultes, a 20th-century ethnobotany.Jonathan Kandell, Richard E. Schultes, 86, Dies; Trailblazing Authority on Hallucinogenic Plants, The New York Times, April 13, 2001, Accessed April 26, 2020.
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