Born on a farm in Michigan in 1858, Liberty Hyde Bailey graduated from the Michigan Agricultural College with a degree in botany. After working with the renowned botanist Asa Gray at Harvard, he returned to Michigan to teach horticulture and landscape gardening. In 1888, he came to Cornell to build a new curriculum in practical and experimental horticulture. With state funding, he also began a program at Cornell to teach nature study in rural schools. Through extension bulletins, lectures, demonstrations, and farm visits, Bailey built support for his programs among New York State farmers and in the State Legislature.

In 1904, the Legislature passed a bill establishing the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell, and Liberty Hyde Bailey became its first dean. In that role, he established new departments to complement existing fields of study, and appointed Cornell’s first women professors. In 1908, Theodore Roosevelt appointed him to chair a presidential Country Life Commission.

Bailey retired from Cornell in 1913, but continued his scientific, practical, and philosophical pursuits, and made his home in Ithaca for the rest of his life. He wrote and edited numerous books, from textbooks to essays and poems. He traveled extensively on botanical collecting trips, and continued his studies of palms, blackberries, grapes, cabbages, pumpkins and squashes. During his lifetime, he received innumerable awards and honors. Liberty Hyde Bailey died in 1954 at the age of ninety-six.

The Liberty Hyde Bailey birth site, 903 Bailey Avenue, in South Haven, Michigan, is now both a National and State Historic Site.

Bailey served as the founder, first president or president of most of the major organizations concerned with plant life. He was one of the five founding members of the Botanical Society of America; the founder and first president of the American Society for Horticultural Science; first president of the American Nature Study Society; and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Botanical Society of America, the American Pomological Society, the American Association of Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, the American Country Life Association, and the American Society of Plant Taxonomists.

Besides receiving important citations from professional groups in America, he received decorations from Venezuela, England, Scotland, Denmark, New Zealand, Ireland, Italy France, and Japan, and from the International Botanical Congress.

His name is commemorated by Bailey Hall and the L.H. Bailey Hortorium at Cornell; Bailey Hall at Michigan State University and the Liberty Hyde Bailey High School in East Lansing, Michigan; Bailey Hall at Morrisville State College in Morrisville, N.Y.; and the Liberty Hyde Bailey Palm Glade at the Fairchild Tropical Garden, Coconut Grove, Florida.