The University of Tennessee's Department of Botany was housed in Hesler Hall. It was discontinued as an academic department on January 1, 2005 and its faculty and classes were reassigned to the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the Department of Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology, and the Division of Biology.

Harry Milliken Jennison, Professor of Botany at the University of Tennessee, was formerly a Service Wildlife Technician assigned to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Jennison spent much of his time with the University collecting and studying the flora of the Park and prepared around 5,000 herbarium specimens from Park samples. He died on January 5, 1940.

Stanley Adair Cain was born in 1902. He distinguished himself early in his career with a series of papers discussing plant ecology and geography, including one of the first works making use of the technique of aerial photography (1927). He served as an Assistant Professor and as a Professor at the University of Tennessee from 1935 to 1946. After World War II, Cain became increasingly interested in the conservation of natural resources and assumed a number of prominent government positions that brought attention to a variety of problems associated with overconsumption and overpopulation. He founded the first Department of Conservation at the University of Michigan in 1950 and served as its chairman for eleven years. Cain later chaired of the University's Institute of Environmental Quality. After his retirement, he moved to Santa Cruz, California where he remained active into the early 1980s. Stanley Cain died in Santa Cruz on April 1, 1995.