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Home›People›Henry and James Groves›The other Henry Groves
Search for “Henry Groves, botanist” and you will soon find a second one: an English pharmacist who lived in Florence and explored the wild country of southern Italy. He is not our Henry, and Italian botanists have themselves mixed the two men up. This page sets out the differences, drawing on a short note by Quintino Giovanni Manni (2020), summarised here in English with his references.
| Henry Groves of London | Henry “Enrico” Groves of Florence | |
|---|---|---|
| Born | London, 15 October 1855 | Weymouth, Dorset, 1835 |
| Upbringing | Godalming Grammar School; family back in London after 1869 | Son of Richard Groves, pharmacist |
| Work | Stockbroker’s office, then Queen Anne’s Bounty Office | Pharmacist; owner of the “Antica Farmacia Groves”, Piazza Goldoni, Florence |
| Botany | Stoneworts (Characeae), with his brother James; Wandsworth Common, Barnes Common | The flora of the Abruzzi and of the heel of Italy (the Terra d’Otranto) |
| Linnean Society | Fellow 1892 | Fellow 1884 (Manni) |
| Married | Miss Bolton, 1896; one daughter | Adalgisa Cristoffanini of Genoa, 1871; one daughter |
| Died | 2 November 1912, aged 57 | Florence, 1 March 1891, aged 56 |
| Buried | Streatham Cemetery, Garratt Lane | The Protestant cemetery, Florence |
| Obituary | By James Groves, Journal of Botany, 1913 | Journal of Botany, 1891, p. 192 (edited by James Britten) |
In 2013 Quintino Manni published, in the Italian botanical annual Acta Plantarum Notes, a biography called “Henry Groves (1855–1912): la vita di un botanico per passione” (“the life of a botanist for love”). He meant to write about the Florence botanist, but he built his account from James Groves’s obituary of the London Henry. In 2016 two botanists, Wagensommer and Galasso, sorting out the names of the plants “E. Groves” had described, pointed out who the Florence man really was. In 2020 Manni published a correction, “Henry and Henry (Enrico) Groves: un curioso caso di omonimia” (“a curious case of two people with the same name”), setting the two lives side by side.
Manni’s account of our Henry adds nothing to James Groves’s obituary, which is on this site in full, and in one place it repeats the old mistake: it has Henry’s training showing in his travels “in France and in Italy”. James is clear that Henry botanised abroad only once, in south-west France in 1909.
Henry Groves was born at Weymouth in 1835, the son of a pharmacist, Richard Groves. He qualified at the School of the Pharmaceutical Society in 1856, at 21, with a special interest in botany, and in 1858 published a study of the flora of Portland in The Phytologist.
After further study in London and Brussels he moved in 1862 to Florence, where he spent the rest of his life. His pharmacy in Piazza Goldoni became a meeting point for the English-speaking community living in or passing through the city. In 1871 he married Adalgisa Elena Maria Cristoffanini of Genoa, and they had a daughter.
Between 1875 and 1877 he made long and often difficult journeys, with his wife, into parts of Italy that botanists had hardly explored: the Sirente mountains in the Abruzzi, the Majella and Monte Morrone, Monte Argentario, and the coast of the Salento from Taranto round the Capo di Leuca. He published his findings in Italian, as “Enrico Groves”, following the custom of the time, in the Nuovo Giornale Botanico Italiano: on the Terra d’Otranto (1877 and 1887) and on the Sirente (1880). In English he wrote on the cultivation of saffron in the Abruzzi (1875) and on “The Coast Flora of Japygia, S. Italy” (Journal of the Linnean Society, 1886).
He described several plants new to science, among them Centaurea tenacissima and Anthemis hydruntina (from Hydruntum, the Latin name of Otranto), and named a variety of star-of-Bethlehem, Ornithogalum refractum var. adalgisae, after his wife, “his inseparable travelling companion and herself a keen botanist”.
He was not without humour. Of the Alimini lakes near Otranto he wrote in 1877:
Around the two lakes the none too friendly faces of the buffaloes add to the sweet emotions of botanising a strong desire to make off, so as not to offend these fellow plant-gatherers, who, gathering plants themselves, might harbour a professional jealousy!
[E. Groves, “Contribuzione alla flora della Terra d’Otranto”, Nuovo Giornale Botanico Italiano 9 (1877); translated.]
He died in Florence on 1 March 1891, aged 56, and was buried in the city’s Protestant cemetery, leaving unfinished a study of the sea-lavenders (Statice). By his will his herbarium of about 30,000 specimens went to the Natural History Museum in Florence, where, with later additions, the Groves collection now numbers nearly 50,000. A Sicilian journal mourned “one of those few spirited men who made a large contribution to our knowledge of the Italian Flora”.
Do you know more about Henry or James Groves, or where the family lived in London? Please let me know.