Dutch botanist, born in Holland. He traveled in Europe, America and Asia, making collections of specimens of natural history, and finally settled in Kent, England, where he pursued the calling of landscape-gardener; later established a botanical garden at South Lambeth, and in 1629 was appointed gardener to Charles I. The American perennial herb, Tradescantia (spiderwort), is named for him.—His son, John, born in Meopham, Kent, in 1608, also traveled and collected curiosities, a detailed description of which he published under the title Museum Tradescantium, or, A Collection of Rarities Preserved at South Lambeth (1656). This collection he gave to Elias Ashmole, and it became the nucleus of the collections in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the first public museum in Great Britain, which was founded by the man whose name it commemorates in 1683. Tradescant the younger died on the 22nd of April 1662.
