English banker, lawyer, a Member of Parliament, historian, art collector, botanist, writer.
His father is a market gardener. He assisted his father in the work of the garden.
In the 1820s he started to publish his work on the reorganization of the Zingiberales order of flowering plants. This was called Monandrian Plants of the Order Scitamineae : Chiefly Drawing from Living Specimens in the Botanical Gardens at Liverpool. It was originally issueed in 15 parts.
The Scitaminean order (nowadays Zingiberales) almost exclusively tropical in origin, includes the canna lilies, arrowroot, ginger and turmeric.
Roscoea provides 1 or 2 pages of text for each 112 specimens, giving the plant's binomial, a technical description, followed by a fuller more general description, and ending with "observations" (where the plant is from, who has described it previously, the drawing of the plant).