Charles Jeffrey (botanist) facts for kids

Charles Jeffrey (born April 10, 1934 – died March 29, 2022) was a British botanist. A botanist is a scientist who studies plants. He spent most of his career at the famous Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he helped classify and understand many different types of plants.

Early Life and Education

Charles Jeffrey was born in Kensington, England. He went to school in Walthamstow. After school, he completed his National service, which was a time when young men served in the armed forces. During this time, he learned to speak Russian at a special school for linguists (people who study languages).

After his service, he went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, a university in England. He studied there and graduated in 1957.

A Career in Plant Science

After finishing university, Charles Jeffrey started working at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This is a very important place for plant science in England. He worked as a taxonomist. A taxonomist is a scientist who identifies, names, and classifies living things, like plants.

He worked in the Herbarium at Kew. A herbarium is like a huge library of dried and preserved plant specimens. Scientists use these collections to study plants from all over the world. Charles Jeffrey worked there until he retired in 1994.

Studying and Naming Plants

Charles Jeffrey was very interested in how plants are named and classified. This field is called Botanical nomenclature. In 1969, he translated an important book called 'Flowering plants: origin and dispersal' by another famous botanist, Armen Takhtajan, from Russian into English. This helped many more scientists learn from Takhtajan's work.

His main research focused on two large plant families:

• The Cucurbitaceae family, which includes plants like pumpkins, squash, and cucumbers.
• The Asteraceae (also known as Compositae) family, which includes plants like daisies, sunflowers, and dandelions.

In 1982, his deep interest in how plants are related led him to suggest a new way to classify all living things. He proposed a "five-kingdom classification" system, which was a way to group all life forms into five main categories.

Plant Collecting Expeditions

As part of his work, Charles Jeffrey also traveled to many different countries to collect plant samples. These samples were then brought back to the herbarium at Kew for study. He collected plants in:

• Gabon (in 1957)
• The Seychelles (in 1962 and 1963)
• Kenya (in 1963)
• Mongolia (in 1970)
• Venezuela (in 1977)

Later Years

After a big conference about the Compositae plant family in 1994, Charles Jeffrey moved to St. Petersburg, Russia. He worked at the Komarov Botanical Institute there. He helped his colleague Armen Takhtajan get money to fix up the institute's herbarium and library building. He also served on the editorial board of a science journal called Botanicheskii Zhurnal until 2006.

Charles Jeffrey passed away in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on March 29, 2022, at the age of 88.

Two plant groups, the genera Jeffreycia and Jeffreya, were named after him to honor his important contributions to botany.