Henry Nicholson Ellacombe:
(1822–1916).
British plantsman and author on botany and gardening.
Ellacombe, the son of Henry Thomas Ellacombe, was born at Bitton, Gloucestershire in 1822. He attended Bath Grammar School and Oriel College, Oxford, graduating in 1844. In 1847 he was ordained and spent a year as a curate at Sudbury, Derbyshire, before returning to Bitton as his father’s curate. In 1850 he succeeded his father as vicar of Bitton. Two years later he married Emily Aprila Wemyss with whom he had ten children. A keen botanist and gardener, Ellacombe grew a wide range of plants at Bitton and exchanged plants and seeds with Kew and other botanical gardens across Europe.
Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker dedicated volume 107 of the Botanical Magazine to him.
In 1897 he was one of the first 60 recipients of the Victoria Medal of Honour.
… There was great pleasure in watching the ways in which different plants come through the ground, and February and March are the months in which that can best be seen.
