Swedish botanist who served as librarian to Joseph Banks in London. Born in Gothenburg to lecturer Carl Leonard Dryander and Brita Maria Montin, Jonas Dryander was advised on his education by his uncle, the botanist Dr Lars Montin, after his father's death. He initially attended the University of Gothenburg and then the University of Lund, from which he graduated in 1776, completing a dissertation on the nature of fungi (specifically, attempting to refute that they are animals, not plants). He then proceeded to Uppsala, where he was a pupil of Carl Linnaeus. After a period serving as a private tutor he moved to England, arriving in London in July 1777.
In London Dryander made contact with Joseph Banks' associate, Daniel Solander, who went on to introduce his fellow Swede to Banks. Dryander was soon taken on as a botanical assistant by Banks, and following the death of Solander in 1782, took over the post of librarian at Banks' Soho home. In addition he was appointed librarian for the Royal Society (of which he was an original Fellow) and Vice-President of the Linnean Society. In 1784 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. As assistant to Banks, Dryander visited all the important gardens of London, supervised Banks' garden at Spring Grove and made numerous visits to William Aiton at Kew. He authored most of the Linnean Society's laws when it was incorporated in 1802.
Dryander's most significant publication was the five-volume Catalogus bibliothecae historico-naturalis Joseph Banks, Baronetti (1796-1800), a catalogue of Banks' library, which contained key works in natural history of the 18th century. He was also the main author of the first edition of William Aiton's Hortus Kewensis (1789), as well as contributing to the second edition of 1810-1813, and edited William Roxburgh's Plants of the Coromandel Coast (1795-1798).
Dryander died at the Linnean Society headquarters in Soho Square on 19 October 1810. Carl Thunberg named the genus Dryandra Thunb. after him.
Sources:
J.H. Barnhart, 1965, Biographical Notes Upon Botanists, 1: 473
G.S. Boulger, rev. Margot Walker, 2004, "Dryander, Jonas Carlsson (1748-1810)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn:
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8105, accessed 6 December 2011
A.H. Uggla, 1944, "Jonas Dryander (1748-1810)", Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 156(2): 99-102.
