author
Nehemiah Grew
1641–1712
A pioneering English botanist and physician, he helped turn the microscope into a tool for understanding how plants are built. His careful studies of stems, roots, seeds, and flowers made him one of the early founders of plant anatomy.
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About the author
Born in 1641, Nehemiah Grew was an English physician, botanist, and microscopist whose work helped reshape the study of plants. He studied at Cambridge and later earned a medical degree at Leiden, then built a career that combined medicine with close scientific observation.
Grew is best known for applying the microscope to plants at a time when that was still a new idea. In works including The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun and The Anatomy of Plants, he described the structure of stems, roots, seeds, and flowers in remarkable detail. His research, often compared with that of Marcello Malpighi, helped lay the foundations of plant anatomy.
He was also active in the Royal Society and worked beyond botany, writing on subjects ranging from chemistry to curiosities in natural history. Even centuries later, he is remembered as one of the first scientists to show that plants had an internal structure worth studying in its own right.