George Bentham was one of the greatest amateur botanists of all time. He wrote the greater part of the stupendous Genera Plantarum, a 7-volume Flora Australensis, a world-wide monograph of the very large Mint family, the first-ever Flora of Hong Kong and, not least, one of the two scholarly handbooks on the flowering plants and ferns of the British Isles which were later to be merged as the evergreen `Bentham and Hooker'.