George Hill Mathewson Lawrence was born in East Greenwich, Rhode Island on June 19, 1910.
[2] Lawrence left Rhode Island to study for his doctorate at Cornell University,[2] (in Ithaca, New York,[1]).
[6] At Cornell, he became a student of the renowned botanist/ horticulturalist Liberty Hyde Bailey, he then received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in botany in 1939.
[2] On 1 December 1949, Lawrence also helped to prepare the revised edition of Manual of Cultivated Plants with Liberty Hyde Bailey.
[12] In 1954, Lawrence also managed the transition of the Bailey Hortorium from its previous home at Sage Place to its new facilities in Mann Library.
[6] Lawrence was also in correspondence with botanist and plant explorer David Fairchild (1869 – 1954) and the American philanthropist, Barbour Lathrop (1847 - 1927).
[16] In 1960, Lawrence left the Bailey Hortorium, (after 21 years of being a student and teacher) to assume the position of director of the newly established Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt Botanical Library at the then Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania,[1] (now Carnegie Mellon University).
[2] On 7 December 1963, he presented a paper at a symposium held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, in L.A., titled 'Herbals, their history and significance'.
[17][18] He was editor of 'Adanson; the bicentennial of Michel Adanson's Families de plantes', published by Hunt Botanical Library, between 1963 and 1964, produced in 2 volumes.
[20] Lawrence had become 'director emeritus' of the Bailey Hortorium before he retired in 1970,[5] this was due in part to ill health.
[3] Lawrence then returned to his native Rhode Island but he remained on the staff of the Hunt Botanical as a Research Associate and Consultant, however, in order to complete an annotated catalogue of its Linnaeus collection.
Working with the donor of the collection, Dr. Birger Strandell, Lawrence devoted the remaining seven and one half years of his life to the completion of the Linnaeus Catalogue.
[2] The Strandell Collection was open in 1976 to view, as completed by director Gilbert S. Daniels, who published papers in Taxon (journal) in 1976.
[5] on 10 June 1978,[2] not long after returning from a trip to London and Uppsala in connection with the Linnean bicentennial commemorations, on the 200th anniversary of the death of Linnaeus.
[2] The bulk of his professional papers are housed in the Archives of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation (formerly the Hunt Botanical Library) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and also at the Liberty Hyde Bailey Hortorium at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
From its inception in 1979 to its ending in 2020, the annual (semi-annual from 1988 to 2000) award in the amount of $2,000 was made to outstanding doctoral candidates with travel costs in support of dissertation research in systematic botany or horticulture or the history of the plant sciences, including literature and exploration.