John Miers (botanist)

John Miers (25 August 1789 – 17 October 1879) was a British botanist and engineer, best known for his work on the flora of Chile and Argentina.

Miers was born in London to jeweler from Yorkshire, and showed interest in mineralogy and chemistry from an early age. His first published work was a monograph on nitrogen which appeared in the "Annals of Philosophy" in 1814. After marriage in 1818 he traveled to South America to participate in a venture to exploit the mineral resource of Chile, particularly copper. However after landing in Buenos Aires his wife came down with childbed fever on the trip across country, and he decided against continuing.

Instead, he took up study of the local flora, which at that time was largely unresearched, In 1825 he returned to England, and the following year published "Travels in Chile and La Plata", the first of several works documenting the plants of the southern cone. Towards the end of the decade he returned to Argentina to work on contracts with the Argentinian mint. Political instability ended this work in 1831 and he moved to Rio de Janeiro to fulfill a similar contract with the Brazilian government, returning to England in 1838. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and assisted in the editing of the papers of others, as well as editing his own.

His most important work was "Contributions to the Botany of South America" (1870); another well-known work was "On the Apocynaceae of South America" (1878). Several taxa are named in his honor.