Tylden Masters studied at the
King's College London and the
University of St Andrews. He attended the lectures of
Edward Forbes and
John Lindley. His most famous works are
Vegetable Teratology, which dealt with
teratology (abnormal mutations) of
vegetable species, and several works on Chinese plants (particularly
conifers), describing many of the new species discovered by
Ernest Henry Wilson. The
larch Larix mastersiana and the
Nepenthes hybrid N. × mastersiana are named after Tylden Masters, among other plant species. A genus that was published in 1871,
Maxwellia from
New Caledonia, also bears his name. Tylden Masters was the editor of the ''
Gardeners' Chronicle'' between 1866 and 1907, which led to him corresponding with
Charles Darwin. He was elected a fellow of the
Royal Society in 1870. He was made a correspondent of the
Institute of France in 1888. He was also a chevalier of the
order of Leopold. Tylden Masters died at the Mount,
Ealing, on 30 May 1907. His body was cremated at
Woking. His obituary in The American Florist credited him with preventing
Kew Gardens "from being handed over to a political clique", with the
Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) holding onto its Chiswick Garden, and for preventing "confiscation" of the RHS
Lindley Library "in the dark days of the society at South Kensington". His obituary in
Nature recites that his most definitive contributions to botany was when he was older and studying
Coniferae since he wrote many papers to the Linnean and Horticultural Societies regarding their "structure and taxonomy." ==Family==