Biography

Dutch naturalist and friend of Carl Linnaeus. A native of Leiden, it was here that Jan (or Johan) Gronovius built his reputation, in particular as a botanist, with a fine herbarium of specimens acquired from collectors around the world. Significantly he came to possess much botanical material from Virginia, collected there by John Clayton in the 1730s. These specimens formed the basis of Gronovius' Flora Virginica (1739-1743), which the Dutch botanist produced without informing Clayton. He also compiled a Flora Orientalis, based on the Rauwolf herbarium, and was the first author of Linnaea borealis L., a plant from Lapland whose name commemorates the Swedish naturalist (the name was later formalised by Linnaeus).

While in the Netherlands between 1735 and 1738, Linnaeus studied much of Gronovius' Clayton material and acquired duplicates of specimens in the collection. The original Clayton herbarium was later acquired by Joseph Banks and is now at the herbarium of the Natural History Museum in London (BM). Linnaeus' knowledge of North American plants, at the time he published his Species Plantarum (1753), was largely based on the Clayton herbarium (in addition to collections by Pehr Kalm). Earlier, when he had first met Gronovius, the latter was so struck by Linnaeus' manuscript Systemae Naturae that the Dutch naturalist published it at his own expense, in eight folio sheets.

Gronovius was married to Margaretha Trigland (d.1726) and later to Johanna Alensoon. His son Lauren Theodor Gronovius (1730-1777) became a botanist also.

Sources:
J.H. Barnhart, 1965, Biographical Notes Upon Botanists, 2: 90
C. Jarvis, 2007, Order out of Chaos: 208
The Clayton Herbarium, Natural History Museum London:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/research-curation/research/projects/clayton-herbarium, accessed 14 November 2011.