Benjamin Heyne

Benjamin Heyne FLS (1770, Pirna, Döbra – 6 February 1819, Madras) was a German botanist, naturalist, and surgeon who worked in British India as a Botanist to Samalkot in the Madras Presidency under the British East India Company.

In later life, Heyne joined the Tranquebar Mission run by Moravians where he took an interest in the botanical gardens.

After the fall of Tipu Sultan, he was appointed to look for a new site for a botanical garden in Mysore and he chose Lalbagh.

[3] In 1800, after the fall of Mysore, the Lalbagh botanical garden at Bangalore was appropriated by the British East India Company "as a depository for useful plants sent from different parts of the country".

Dr. Benjamin Heyne, the Company's botanist at Madras, was ordered by the Governor-General, Richard Wellesley to accompany the Surveyor, with the following instructions: "A decided superiority must be given to useful plants over those which are merely recommended by their rarity or their beauty,... to collect with care all that is connected with the arts and manufacturers of this country, or that promises to be useful in our own; to give due attention to the timber employed in the various provinces of his route,... and to collect with particular diligence the valuable plants connected with his own immediate profession, i.e.

[5] He sent about 1500 of his Indian botanical specimens to the German botanist Albrecht Wilhelm Roth, whose work Novae plantarum species praesertim Indiae orientali (a book of Indian flora) is largely based on Heyne's botanical specimens.