Philip Miller

[a] Miller corresponded with other botanists, and obtained plants from all over the world, many of which he cultivated for the first time in England and is credited as their introducer.

His knowledge of living plants, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, was unsurpassed in breadth in his lifetime.

The Duke of Bedford contracted him to supervise the pruning of fruit trees at Woburn Abbey and the care of his prized collection of American trees, especially evergreens, which were grown from seeds that, on Miller's suggestion, had been sent in barrels from Pennsylvania, where they had been collected by John Bartram.

[6] Through a consortium of sixty subscribers, 1733–66, the contents of Bartram's boxes introduced such American trees as Abies balsamea and Pinus rigida into English gardens.

Miller was reluctant to use the new binomial nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus, preferring the classifications of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and John Ray at first.