John Gilbert Baker was born on 13 January 1834 in England.
He was educated in York and held a great passion for understanding and preserving plants. In 1865, J. G. Baker was elected a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London
Baker started to work at the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens; in 1866, where he also performed as an assistant curator of the herbarium.
In 1870, John Gilbert Baker read a paper to the Linnean Society entitled “A Revision of the Genera and Species of Herbaceous Capsular Gamophyllous Liliaceae”.
John Gilbert Baker published an elementary and highly descriptive 600-page publication, Flora of Mauritius and the Seychelles for the Colonial Government in 1877.
In 1878, he became a member of the Royal Horticultural Society.
In 1890 Baker was appointed the curator of the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens and stayed in post until 1899.
Another publication of John Gilbert Baker is the Handbook of the Irideae issued in 1892
In 1897, John Gilbert Baker received the Victoria Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Linnean in 1899.
In 1907, Baker received the Veitch Memorial (Gold) Medal, awarded annually by the Royal Horticultural Society for outstanding contribution to the advancement and improvement of the science and practice of horticulture.
Throughout his career, John Gilbert Baker described the Hemerocallis plants and wrote on many plant groups such the Amaryllidaceae, Bromeliaceae, Iridaceae, Liliaceae, and ferns.
In 1919, the University of Leeds awarded John Gilbert Baker an honorary doctorate.
John Gilbert Baker was the Doyen of British field-botanists when he passed away on August 16 1920 in London.