He inherited property in Yoxhall and purchased a malthouse and inn at Stafford and his profession at the time of death was recorded as "maltster".
He apprenticed as an apothecary in 1672 and worked with maltster John Solley before going into his father's business, to which he succeeded around the year 1696.
He had given some attention to botany before 1687, the date of a commonplace book, but his help is first acknowledged by John Ray in 1688 in the second volume of the Historia Plantarum.
He was intimate with the botanists of his time: Ray, Leonard Plukenet, James Petiver, and Hans Sloane.
The results of his herborisations around London were recorded in his copy of Ray's ‘Synopsis,’ 2nd edit., now in the British Museum, and were used by Dillenius in preparing the third edition.