English botanist and gardener to Queen Mary. Plukenet is especially known for his illustrated work, Phytographia, and as a collaborator of John Ray on Historia Plantarum.
Plukenet was born in Westminster, London, and remained resident there most of his life. After his education at Westminster School he apparently went to Hart Hall, Oxford, and became a doctor of medicine. However his name does not appear in the records of medical graduates in England. He appears to have practised as a physician and was quite wealthy at the time of his death, though whether this was from inheritance or successful practice is not known. In 1699 he married Letitia Manley, with whom he had seven children.
Plukenet must have spent a good deal of time learning about botany, for he is mentioned in a letter from John Ray to Hans Sloane in 1684 and emerged at this time as a competitor of Sloane and James Petiver in amassing a great herbarium of plants from around the world, sent to him by correspondents. He assisted John Ray with the second volume of Historia Plantarum and Ray mentions Plukenet as a botanist of the highest order in the preface of his 1690 Synopsis.
Favoured by Queen Mary (consort of William III), in about 1690 Plukenet was appointed supervisor at the king's gardens of Hampton Court Palace. The following year, when he was already 50 years old, Plukenet's first publication appeared. The first three parts of the Phytographia (1691-1692) contained 250 plates, published at Plukenet's own expense. A fourth part was brought out in 1696, with the works Almagestum botanicam (1696) and its supplement, Almagestum botanici mantissa (1700). An additional volume, the Amaltheum botanicum, with 104 plates, was published in 1705, along with an index to the whole. Together these tomes were considered one great corpus on new and rare plants from around the world, and they were collected together as one complete work in 1720, with a further edition of this brought out in 1796. Carl Linnaeus drew significantly on the Phytographia and P.D. Giseke later compiled an Index Linnaeus (1779), collating Plukenet's figures with the latter's species.
Among the many plants figured in Plukenet's work were many from America, including scores collected by John Banister of Virginia. His specimens from St Helena are also of special interest, for they provide some of the earliest examples of the island's endemic plants, some now extinct. Plukenet's herbarium was superior to Petiver's in terms of organisation, but the sources of specimens often remains a mystery. In his later life he also amassed a collection of 1,700 insects, which he pressed like plants. Deposited at the Natural History Museum in London, it is possibly the oldest collection of British insects in existence.
In terms of personality, Plukenet was not only scathing of Petiver, but was considered somewhat conceited by Sloane. Sir Hans Sloane nevertheless bought Plukenet's collections following his death on 6 July 1706, after they were first acquired by Dr Moore, Bishop of Norwich. He was buried in St Margaret's Church, Westminster, where he had been baptised. The collections now form part of the Sloane Herbarium at the Natural History Museum, London.
Sources:
D.E. Allen, 2004, "Plukenet, Leonard (bap. 1642, d. 1706)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/22394, accessed 30 November 2011
J. Britten and J.E. Dandy, eds., 1958, The Sloane herbarium: 183-187
B.D. Jackson, 1882, "Leonard Plukenet, 'queen's botanist'", Journal of Botany, British and Foreign, 20: 338-342
R. Pulteney, 1790, Historical and biographical sketches of the progress of botany in England, 2: 18-29
H. Trimen and W.T.T. Dyer, 1869, Flora of Middlesex: 374-376.
