Henry, Augustine (1857–1930), plant collector and forester, was born at Dundee, Scotland, on 2 July 1857. His father, Bernard Henry (c.1825–1891) was a catholic originally from Tyanee, Co. Londonderry. In 1847, during the great famine, he had emigrated to America and tried his hand as a ‘forty-niner’ in the Californian gold rush, but without success. Later he tried, equally unsuccessfully, to prospect for gold in Australia, before returning home. Augustine's mother, Mary MacNamee, also came from Scotland. Augustine (known as Austin in the family) was the eldest of six children. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, where Bernard Henry ran a business as a flax dealer and grocer. Augustine went to the local school, Cookstown Academy, and his flair for science soon attracted attention and brought him grants and scholarships. He took a BA in natural sciences and philosophy at QCG, graduating with first-class honours and a gold medal in 1877. The next year he took an MA in medicine at QCB; he then did a year's practical course at a London hospital, but began to doubt whether he was cut out for the humdrum life of a doctor in Britain or Ireland.
By chance in 1879 he met, while on holiday in Belfast, Sir Robert Hart (qv), the distinguished Ulsterman who was on leave from his post as inspector general of the Chinese imperial maritime customs service. Sir Robert encouraged Henry to apply for a job in the Chinese customs service; he would be part medical officer, part customs official. Henry took a crash course in medicine at Edinburgh, where he became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, and learned enough Chinese to pass the exams for the Chinese customs service. In 1881, aged barely twenty-four, he sailed for China and was posted to the cosmopolitan port city of Shanghai, where he joined the large expatriate community. But in March 1882 he was sent to the inland port of Ichang in Hupeh province 900 miles up the Yangtze from Shanghai.
Henry's official duties were unexciting and life at Ichang was claustrophobic for the small foreign community. By November 1884 he had taken up plant collecting as a hobby. The town itself was a mere 70 feet above sea level, at the western end of the monotonous plain that dominates central China. But only a few miles west of Ichang the Yangtze had hacked its way through a series of vast limestone gorges (later submerged under one of the largest dams in the world). In Henry's day this mountainous country was barely explored by Europeans. A few years earlier a professional plant collector had been sent to Ichang by the English firm of Veitch, and he reported that there was little of interest. The botanical discoveries made by Henry in the space of five years were therefore all the more dazzling to the world of science. At first he could make only brief forays from Ichang. Then he was given three months’ leave, and used it for two long plant-collecting trips in Hupeh and Szechwan. He also paid local Chinese to collect specimens for him. Soon he was sending back thousands of specimens, meticulously dried and sorted, to be classified at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. The professionals rubbed their eyes. An unknown Irish amateur had discovered several hundred new botanical species and genera. The temperate mountains of Hupeh and Szechwan were a treasure trove of extraordinary new plants.
In 1889 Henry was transferred to the Chinese tropical island of Hainan, then returned home on leave, and on 20 June 1891 he married Caroline Orridge, the daughter of a London jeweller. The couple travelled to China and were based first at Shanghai, then on Taiwan. Henry wrote Notes on economic botany in China in 1893. The marriage was cut tragically short by Caroline Henry's death from tuberculosis in September 1894. Henry remained in China and was posted in turn to two southern cities, Mengzi and Simao, which were even more isolated than Ichang. From here he continued to send vast numbers of dried specimens back to Kew, and published notes on Chinese flora. (In all he was to send back a total of 15,980 specimens.) In December 1900, when his work even in that backwater had been threatened by the Boxer rebellion, Henry resigned his post and sailed for Europe.
In botanical circles Henry was now as famous as the French Jesuit missionaries Père David and Père Delavay, who had pioneered botanical collecting in Yunnan, close to Hupeh and Szechwan. In fact Henry was better supported by Kew, and his discoveries were made more of, than the French Jesuits and their work had been by botanists in France. In 1902 Henry was awarded the Veitch memorial medal by the Royal Horticultural Society of London. In 1906 he was given the Victoria medal of honour. Meanwhile he was pressed by the firm of Veitch to return to China as a professional plant hunter.
But Henry now trained his sights on an entirely new career: forestry. In China he had been shocked at how the old-growth forests were vanishing, as they had already vanished from Ireland, most parts of Europe and the United States to clear land for farmers. He decided to try to reverse this process by doing something ‘practical’ (as he told an Irish friend, Evelyn Gleeson (qv), whom he was helping to set up the craft centre, Dun Emer, near Dublin). He persuaded the authorities in Dublin to arrange for him to take a forestry course at Nancy in eastern France. He also happened to meet Henry Elwes, a wealthy British tree enthusiast, and the two men began a vast project that was to take them to many parts of the world and dominate ten years of their lives: a joint book encompassing all the 300-odd species and several thousand varieties of trees cultivated or growing naturally in Britain and Ireland. The book was eventually privately published in seven volumes as Trees of Great Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1906–13). The scope was breathtaking. The authors personally inspected almost all the trees they described. But their work was much more than a descriptive catalogue. They were fascinated by the economic potential, as timber, of many little-known imported species.
Henry's career in the new academic field of forestry blossomed. In 1907 he was appointed the first reader in forestry at Cambridge university. On 17 March 1908 he married Alice Helen (‘Elsie’) Brunton (1882–1956), daughter of a leading London physician, Sir Lauder Brunton. But his ambition was always to move to Ireland, where he had a circle of artistic friends (including many of the leaders of the Gaelic revival, such as George Russell (qv) (‘AE’) and W. B. Yeats (qv) and his family). In 1913 he was appointed the first professor of forestry in the Royal College of Science, Dublin. He played a pioneering role in modern Irish forestry. When a government inquiry on forestry in 1907 sought to establish what were the species most suitable for planting in Ireland most experts favoured the broad-leaved trees that were common in Europe, like oak, ash, and beech. Henry disputed whether these slow-growing trees would ever make money; he recommended the opposite – fast-growing Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, and other conifers from north-west America. Henry's advice was taken, and he can now be regarded, for better or worse, as the man who clothed Ireland with money-making conifers from the mountains to the sea.
Henry retired in 1926, and died 23 March 1930 at his home 5 Sandford Terrace, Clonskeagh, Co. Dublin. A lapsed catholic, he was buried at Dean's Grange cemetery, Dublin. There were no children from either of his marriages. But he left an uncounted number of descendants in the form of plants that took his name because he was the first to record them. Examples range from the orange lily (Lilium henryi), and the blue rhododendron (Rhododendron augustinii) to the hair-toothed lime (Tilia henryana) and the large-leaved cotoneaster (Cotoneaster henryanus). A memorial stone was erected in his honour at Avondale, Co. Wicklow, and a memorial plaque in Portglenone forest, Co. Antrim. In China a wing of the Fan Memorial Institute of Botany in Peking (Beijing) was named after him (since demolished).
Henry's diaries and papers are in Archbishop Marsh's Library, Dublin; the Henry Library at the John F. Kennedy Arboretum, Co. Wexford; the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin; and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His letters to Evelyn Gleeson are in the NLI.