---
title: "William Jackson Hooker"
chunk: 4/4
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jackson_Hooker"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:06:29.967042+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

In June 1815, he married Maria Sarah Turner, the eldest daughter of Dawson Turner and Mary Palgrave. Maria was an amateur artist who collected mosses, and who with her sister Elizabeth illustrated them for her husband. The couple toured the Lake District and across Ireland on their honeymoon, before travelling to Scotland.
They had five children. William Dawson Hooker (born 1816) was a naturalist who trained as a doctor. He published Notes on Norway (1837 and 1839). He emigrated with his new wife to Jamaica to practise medicine, but died at Kingston, aged 24. Joseph Dalton Hooker (born 1817) became a botanist and was appointed the first assistant director at Kew. He served in this post for 10 years, before taking over as director from his father in 1865. The three daughters in the family were Maria (born 1819), Elizabeth (born 1820), and Mary Harriet (born 1825), who died aged sixteen.

=== Death ===
He was engaged on the Synopsis filicum with the botanist John Gilbert Baker when he contracted a throat infection then epidemic at Kew.

== Works ==

Hooker studied mosses, liverworts, and ferns, and published a monograph on a group of liverworts, British Jungermanniae, in 1816. This was succeeded by a new edition of William Curtis's Flora Londinensis, for which he wrote the descriptions (1817–1828); by a description of the Plantae cryptogamicae of Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland; by the Muscologia, a very complete account of the mosses of Britain and Ireland, prepared in conjunction with Thomas Taylor and first published in 1818; and by his Musci exotici (2 volumes, 1818–1820), devoted to new foreign mosses and other cryptogamic plants.
Hooker published more than 20 major botanical works over a period of 50 years, including British Jungermanniae (1816), Musci Exotici (1818–1820), Icones Filicum (1829–1831), Genera Filicum (1838) and Species Filicum (1846–1864). Other works include Flora Scotica (1821), The British Flora (1830) and Flora Borealis Americana; or, The Botany of the Northern Parts of British America (1840).
With William Wilson he edited the exsiccata series Musci Americani; or, specimens of mosses, Jungermanniae, &c. collected by the late Thomas Drummond, in the Southern States of North America. Arranged and named by W. Wilson and Sir W. J. Hooker (1841) with bryophyte specimens of the plant collector Thomas Drummond.  

=== Examples ===

== Plants named after William Jackson Hooker ==
A number plants have the Latin specific epithet of hookeri which refers to Hooker.
Including;

Allium hookeri
Alsophila hookeri
Anthurium hookeri
Arctostaphylos hookeri
Dasypogon hookeri
Drosera hookeri
Epiphyllum hookeri
Iris hookeri
Kopsiopsis hookeri
Lithops hookeri
Lysiphyllum hookeri
Ozothamnus hookeri
Notholaena hookeri
Pachyphytum hookeri
Prosartes hookeri
Pseudarthria hookeri
Townsendia hookeri

== References ==

== Sources ==
Allan, Mea (1967). The Hookers of Kew 1795–1911. London: M. Joseph. OCLC 459374580.
Fitzgerald, Sylvia (2020). "Hooker, Sir William Jackson". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/13699. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.) (subscription may be required or content may be available in libraries)
Hooker, Joseph Dalton (1902). "A Sketch of the Life and Labours of Sir William Jackson Hooker". In Balfour, Isaac Bayley; Scott, D.H.; Farlow, William Gilson (eds.). Annals of Botany. Vol. 16. London: Henry Froud.
Richardson, Gudrun (2002). "A Norfolk Network within the Royal Society". Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 56. The Royal Society: 27–39. doi:10.1098/rsnr.2002.0165. S2CID 144486428.
"Sir William Jackson Hooker (1785–1865)". Kew, History & Heritage. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Archived from the original on 28 April 2008.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Hooker, Sir William Jackson". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 13 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 674–675.

== External links ==

Details of the books, articles, etc. written by William Jackson Hooker from the Biodiversity Heritage Library
Details of collections in the United Kingdom containing Hooker's correspondence, notes and drawings, from the National Archives
The Hookers' blue plaque at Kew (English Heritage)
"About the Directors' Correspondence Digitisation team". Kew Botanic Gardens. 2013. Archived from the original on 17 February 2013.
Details of Hooker's will: "Find a will". gov.uk.