page_title: Lee and Kennedy
section_title: Botanical writing and scholarship
hierarchical_section_title: Lee and Kennedy / Botanical writing and scholarship
caption_attribution_description: James Lee. Stipple engraving by S. Freeman, 1810. Scottish-born botanist, biography. Iconographic Collections Keywords: portrait prints; James Lee; stipple prints
context_page_description: Lee and Kennedy were two families of prominent Scottish nurserymen in partnership for three generations at the Vineyard Nursery in Hammersmith, west of London. "For many years," wrote John Claudius Loudon in 1854, "this nursery was deservedly considered the first in the world."
context_section_description: James Lee was a correspondent with Carl Linnaeus, through Lee's connection with the Chelsea Physic Garden. He compiled an introduction to the Linnaean system, An Introduction to Botany, published in 1760, which passed through five editions.
  In 1774 the partnership issued a Catalogue of plants and seeds: sold by Kennedy and Lee, nurserymen. The partners also kept their name prominently before English garden-owners by regularly providing material for botanical illustrations in Curtis's Botanical Magazine. In addition, they were in correspondence with plant collectors in the Americas and with Francis Masson and others at the Cape of Good Hope, from which hardy and half-hardy plants and seeds were coming to be tested in English gardens and hothouses.
  Lewis Kennedy's son John Kennedy (b. Hammersmith, 8 October 1759, d. Eltham, 18 February 1842), raised in the family business, was a frequent contributor to the first five volumes (1799–1803) of the Henry Cranke Andrews publication The Botanist's Repository, for which he wrote most of the notes accompanying the illustrations, and contributed less frequently thereafter.  Andrews was his son-in-law. John Kennedy also was the writer of Page's Prodromus, an 1817 scholarly work published under the name of another son-in-law, William Bridgwater Page.
caption: Portrait of James Lee. Credit: Wellcome Collection
exif: {}