Illustration of th moss Hypnum Aquaticum, from Plantarum indigenarum et exoticarum icones (1788).
Featured on PDR in the essay Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology
Obsessed with the smallest and seemingly least exciting of plants — mosses and liverworts — the 19th-century botanist Richard Spruce never achieved the fame of his more popularist contemporaries. Elaine Ayers explores the work of this unsung hero of Victorian plant science and how his complexities echoed the very subject of his study.



