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Sereno Watson (December 1, 1826 – March 9, 1892) was an American botanist. He served as curator of the Gray Herbarium at Harvard University and as botanist on the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel scientific expedition.
After graduation, he drifted through various occupations, working as a schoolteacher and studying medicine for five years. In 1852, his uncle, Julius Reed, a founder of Grinnell College, got him a job as a tutor at the college. In 1854, Watson completed his medical training and joined the practice of his elder brother, Dr. Louis Watson, in Quincy, Illinois. In 1856, he went to Greensboro, Alabama, to work as secretary of Planters' Insurance Company, of which his eldest brother, Henry Watson, was president. In 1861, he went to Hartford, Connecticut, and assisted Henry Barnard to edit the Journal of Education.
In fall 1869, Watson returned to Yale to work on the specimens he had collected, collaborating with Professor Daniel Cady Eaton. In late 1870 he joined the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University. In 1871, he published Volume 5 of the publications of the Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, including a "Catalogue of the Known Plants of Nevada and Utah." The 426-page catalog identified 1,325 plant species and constituted the first descriptive list of the whole known flora of any region in western North America.
In 1873, Professor Asa Gray appointed Watson to serve as his assistant at Harvard's Gray Herbarium. On June 29, 1874, Watson became curator of the Gray Herbarium, a position he held until his death. From 1881 to 1883 he also held a concurrent academic appointment as instructor in Botany and phytogeography at Harvard University. He made several collecting trips, including to Montana in 1880 and Guatemala in 1885. Watson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1874, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1889, and a foreign member of the Linnean Society of London in 1890.
Watson specialized in Plant taxonomy and plant taxonomy, publishing a series of eighteen papers entitled Contributions to American Botany in the pages of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He published several scientific monographs, including Botany of California (1880), and more than 100 articles and reviews in scientific journals such as the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, The American Naturalist, American Journal of Science and Arts, Science, and Botanical Gazette.
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