[6] He used 10,000 acres (4,000 ha) of land he inherited and built a curvilinear greenhouse for breeding plants including strawberries, cabbages and peas.

In 1797 he published his Treatise on the Culture of the Apple and Pear, and on the Manufacture of Cider and Perry, a work which passed through several editions.

His work on the specific gravity and thus sugar content of apple juice were important to development of the UK cider industry.

He also devised new horticultural and agricultural equipment such as a new turnip seed drill, razor sharpener and pineapple pit.

[8][9] He was one of the leading UK researchers in horticulture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but his personal papers disappeared after his death.

It is not widely known that he studied variation in peas and made similar observations to Mendel, but he failed to make the same imaginative leap about the relationships between these changes.

[10] Knight intentionally shut himself off from outside scientific influences but did maintain correspondence with others around the world as well as meeting some of them during his annual visits to London.

He refused to read anyone else's scientific papers until Sir Joseph Banks, with whom he had a voluminous correspondence, persuaded him to do so.