Walter Wade

Who was Walter Wade?

Walter Wade, was an Irish botanist.

Wade was a physician practising in Dublin in 1790. Aylmer Bourke Lambert in a letter to James Edward Smith states that through Wade's exertions a grant of £300 was obtained to establish the botanic garden at Dublin, and that he intended publishing a work entitled Flora Dublinensis. Undated folio sheets of this proposed work exist, with plates, under the title Floræ Dublinensis Specimen, but it was never carried out.

In 1794 Wade published Catalogus Systematicus Plantarum indigenarum in comitatu Dublinensi … pars prima, on the title-page of which he describes himself as M.D., licentiate of the King's and Queen's College of Physicians, and lecturer on botany. This work is in Latin, arranged on the Linnæan system, with carefully verified localities and indexes of the Latin, English, and Irish names, the sedges and cryptogamic plants being reserved for a second part, which was never published. Lady Kane, in her anonymous Irish Flora, says of this work that it was "the first that appeared in Ireland under a systematic arrangement", and that its author "may be justly considered as the first who diffused a general taste for botany in this country".