Banks was a bit of a pioneer. But there have been loads of great botanists. I love Roy Lancaster, a great botanist and conservationist and communicator, but he ain't dead! I met him a few years ago at Heligan in Cornwall and his enthusiasm and powers of inspiration were undimmed. He and I had a mutual friend, Vicar Shaw of Waterhead, Oldham, which was the vicar's parish. Vicar Shaw's speciality was finding exotic plants on the squalid rubbish tips of Lancashire, the sort of plants that had sprung up from seeds imported on wool shoddy and other industrial waste. One of his very favourite spots was the Crown Wallpaper tip in Darwen, not far from the famous India Mill campanile. He and I once spent a joyous day on Nob End Tip, where the Irwell meets the Croal, a Victorian dump for alkaline waste, which has an amazing assemblage of alien plants that you'd think have no place in Lancashire. But he did appreciate beauty too, and he and I, accompanied by the great Darwen botanist Peter Fentem, climbed Penyghent one April day to see the purple saxifrage in full flower. I'd seen the saxifrage in several places in the Scottish highlands, but this was a first for the Rev at his then age of 77, a chap who had no interest whatsoever in botanising beyond his beloved north of England. So I'm nominating Vicar Charles Edward, as he called himself, though I'm certainly going to be in a minority of one!

Steve, the lad nominated by the man himself as Vicar Shaw's "Radcliffe eye." And he was no relation, in case you think I'm biased!