- John Gould Veitch
John Gould Veitch (April 1839 – 13 August 1870) was a horticulturist and traveller, one of the first Victorian plant hunters to visit Japan. A great-grandson of John Veitch, the founder of the Veitch
horticulture dynasty, he also visited the Philippines, Australia, Fiji, and other Polynesian islands.He brought back a number of the glasshouse plants in vogue at the time, such as "
Acalypha s", "Cordyline s", "Codiaeum s" (Crotons) and " Dracaenas", and, from Fiji, a palm of a new genus later named after him, "Veitchia joannis ". The Veitch family name is honoured by hundreds of plant names, including the genus "Veitchia ".In Japan, he came across the eminent plant collector
Robert Fortune , and their competing collections returned to England on the same ship. For example, both men claimed discovery of a species of "Chamaecyparis pisifera ".He was married to Jane Hodge soon after his return to England in 1866 and fathered two sons,
James Herbert Veitch (1868 – 1907) and John Gould Veitch, Jr. (1869 – 1914) before dying oftuberculosis at the age of 31.External links
* [http://www.pacsoa.org.au/places/People/veitch.html "John Gould Veitch 1839 - 1870", by Ian Edwards, The Tropical Garden Society of Sydney]
* [http://www.tobymusgrave.com/pdf/Veitch_Nursery.pdf "Seeds of Fortune – A Gardening Dynasty", by Sue Shepard, Bloomsbury, June 2003]
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