People said that James Backhouse was a delicate man.

Struck down by tuberculosis as a child, he was considered “too delicate to pursue a sedentary occupation,” and advised to “spend time in the open air, and to study botany.”

Backhouse took that advice, became a nurseryman and botanist with his brother in the midlands of England, suffered great personal loss when his young wife of five years, Deborah, the mother of his two children, died, and then set out on a course that was anything but delicate.

I was interested to know more about this English Quaker in whose honour a genus of 13 species of aromatic Australian rainforest trees and shrubs – the Backhousias - was later named.

Seven of those species are listed by the book ‘Mangroves to Mountains’ as g