Charles Edward Moss

Charles Edward Moss (February 7, 1870 Hyde, Cheshire – November 11, 1930 Johannesburg), was an English-born South African botanist, the youngest son of a nonconformist minister, and is noted for being the editor of the first two parts of The Cambridge British Flora published in 1914 and 1920.

1898 saw him working at Fairweather Green School, though still keeping in touch with Yorkshire College by assisting William Gardner Smith (1866-1928) in mapping the vegetation of West Riding.

In 1907 Moss received his doctorate from the University of Manchester and a back bequest from the Royal Geographical Society for a report on the vegetation of the Pennines which he had done during his spare time.

Edward Walter Hunnybun (1848-1918), a Huntingdon solicitor and amateur botanical artist, decided to embark on a project depicting all the species of the British flora.

He was not a skilled taxonomist, but his supporting network of advisors made up of botanists and collectors ensured that he portrayed representative and correctly identified specimens.

Although of considerable artistic merit, George Claridge Druce (Moss' counterpart at Oxford) criticised them for being scientifically inadequate and lacking in detail.

Despite having turned to botany only six years earlier, Moss displayed a remarkable grasp of the literature of the period, particularly when taking into account that a considerable portion had been written in German.

As a result of a meeting held on 12 January 1915, the Press, under financial strain due to World War I, was deliberately delaying the publication of further volumes of the Flora, which had originally been planned as annual issues.

Moss was also being held partly accountable and was facing legal action for the costs incurred by having replacement plates made for those he had rejected as inadequate.

Moss appointed one of his former students, A. J. Wilmott, to supervise volume III through its publication, and though now in South Africa, he still felt committed to the project and wrote a number of letters spelling out details to be observed.

[4] In 1930, (the year of Charles's death), botanist Nicholas Edward Brown published Mossia, a monotypic genus of flowering plants from Southern Africa belonging to the family Aizoaceae and it was named in Moss's honour.