Douglas-fir

Archibald Menzies

Archibald Menzies (in Europe, pronounced as if spelled “Minges” [MEN-ges], but “MEN-zees” in America) was born near Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland in 1754. He was educated at Weem Parish School and learned botany at Castle Menzies (built in 1057 A.D.). He attended classes at Edinburgh University and studied botany at the Royal Botanic Garden. Introduced to Sir Joseph Banks (see next footnote) in 1786, Menzies obtained a position as surgeon-naturalist and sailed around the world from September 1786, until July 1789. During this voyage he visited the northwest coast of America, but got only as far south as Nootka Sound in British Columbia, Canada. As a result of this experience, Menzies was appointed naturalist for an expedition headed by Captain George Vancouver (1757-1798). Vancouver was given explicit instructions by the Admiralty (e.g., through Banks) that he was to cooperate fully with the efforts of Menzies to collect natural objects. When the surgeon fell ill and returned to England, Menzies assumed those duties as well. Although he managed to collect thousands of specimens on the 1791-1795 voyage, it was often without the assistance of Vancouver. Many of his California collections, for example, were smuggled aboard ship by sailors allowed ashore when Vancouver confined Menzies to ship. His large collection of plants may now be seen at The Linnean Society in London.

Sir Joseph Banks

Joseph Banks was one of the most powerful men in all of natural history in Great Britain. A highly respected naturalist in his own right, he was in the position, as President of the Royal Society from 1778 until 1820, to influence all kinds of the events. As a man of wealth he was well positioned in society, and as a friend of the king he was protected politically. The owner of a large library and a “cabinet of curiosities” that few could rival, he attracted many naturalists to his home at Soho Square in London. Today, his library and collections are the centerpiece of the Department of Botany (originally the Banksian Department) at The Natural History Museum in London. The entire collection of books, specimens and correspondence was bequeathed to Robert Brown (1773-1858) with the proviso that the material would eventually be given to the British Museum. This Brown did in 1827.

Banks was born to a landed Lincolnshire family of modest means. His grandfather, uncle and father were members of Parliament. Although he attended Harrow, Eton and Oxford, Banks was not even a moderately good student—a failing that would be with him his entire life. Voted a member of the Royal Society at age 23, and its President when he was 35, in between he took two voyages. His first was to Newfoundland (1766) and his second (1768-1771) was with Captain James Cook (1728-1779). With the sponsorship of the Royal Society and the backing of the British Admiralty, Cook was given H.M.S. Endeavor to sail to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun. Banks went along as naturalist. Cook’s expedition was a voyage of tremendous British discovery in terms of lands and geographic observations. Banks and the botanist Daniel Solander (1736-1782) matched this in the natural sciences. By hiring botanists and librarians like Solander and Brown, Banks encouraged the publication of numerous books and scientific papers—none of which were to bear his name—including several with superb illustrations executed by Sydney Parkinson (c. 1745-1771), Franz Andreas Bauer (1758-1840), and others. Earlier, his Newfoundland plants had been illustrated by Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770), the foremost botanical illustrator of the day. His unmarried sister, Sarah Sophia, would spend her life taking care of Banks’ correspondence, and his wife Dorothea dealt with all the other details of his life. In 1781, Banks became a baronet; in 1795 he was honored by George III with the Red Ribbon of a Knight of the Order of the Bath. As President of the Royal Society, Banks was an autocrat much as Isaac Newton (1643-1727) and, to a lesser degree Hans Sloane (1660-1753), had been before him. Even toward the end of his life in 1820, Banks was still busy organizing new expeditions and promoting the interests of the Society. He left an enormous legacy that is honored to the present day.

Aylmer Bourke Lambert

Born in 1761, was a British “gentleman of leisure”; in short, he was wealthy! Educated at Oxford (St. Mary Hall), he acquired via purchase a large library of rare botanical publications, and assembled an herbarium of plants from around the world. He published lavishly illustrated works on Cinchona [chin-CHONE-ah] (a plant used to treat malaria) and the conifers. Prior to his death in 1842, Lambert purchased plant collections from several important collectors. He was so consumed with obtaining botanical curiosities and treasures that when he died his family had little in the way of readily available capital. Consequently, the Sotheby auction house sold Lambert’s library and collections just weeks after his death in 1842. Most of his material was obtained by The British Museum and is now at The Natural History Museum in London. A substantial portion also ended up at the botanic garden in Geneva. However, a small lot went back to America—it was the Lewis and Clark specimens Frederick Pursh had taken to England in 1811.

Jean Baptiste Antoine Pierre Monnet de Lamarck

Born in 1744, this French biologist was one of the originators of the theory of evolution. His career was certainly checkered. He served in the French army from 1761 until 1768, worked in a bank until 1778 and then, until 1793, served as a botanist at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Also in 1778, Lamarck was named professor of zoology at the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, holding that position until his death in 1829. At the end of his life, he was blind and lived in near poverty. His Encyclopedie methodique botanique was published in eight volumes with five supplements from 1783 until 1817. In addition, he published a supporting work of 1,000 plant illustrations entitled Tableau encylopedique et methodique, which came out in three volumes between 1791 and 1823. Poiret (1755-1834) was Lamarck’s co-author of the Encyclopedie, having obtained some of his botanical training in the wilds of northern Africa. A prolific writer in his own right, Poiret produced seven volumes on economic plants (published from 1824 until 1829), his most important independent contribution.

David Don was born on December 21,1799, at Doo Hillock, Forgarshire, Scotland, into a family of modest means. Quietly studious, he read and studied botany mainly on his own until he became librarian to Lambert. Responsible for one of the best collections of botany books in private hands, he devoted his energies to learning the library’s content and then applying that knowledge to the collections in Lambert’s large herbarium. He began to publish in 1820 and continued steadily until his death in 1841. In time, Don also became librarian to the Linnean Society of London, and in 1826 assumed the position of professor of botany at King’s College. His best-known work was an 1825 flora of Nepal. (The word flora may refer to plants as a group, or it may denote a treatise describing the plants of a particular region or time. Thus Pursh’s Flora Septentrionalis Americae [“Plants of North America”] is a flora.)

John Lindley

John Lindley was one of the foremost English botanists of his day. Born in 1799, he assumed several important positions after receiving his doctoral degree in Munchen, Germany, in 1832, the most notable being the librarian at the Royal Horticultural Society and professor of botany at University College, London. He was a remarkable scholar with access to the best libraries and collections—both dried and living—so he was to study some of the most difficult groups of plants. He began publishing in 1819, with a monograph on wild and cultivated roses appearing the following year. His first major work on orchids appeared in 1826, and soon he was the world authority on this large and taxonomically complex group. With his appointment to University College in 1829, he published his first synopsis of the British flora, followed the next year by a thorough review of all of the world’s plant families. His books ranged from the technical to the general; he worked on both living and fossil plants; and he regularly taught large numbers of students. His 1838 book on medical botany established him in the forefront of this sub-discipline, and his 1846 The vegetable kingdom set a new standard for college text books in botany. All during his career, Lindley edited several journals and published numerous works for the English garden enthusiast. Even though Lindley died in 1865, others continued many of his publications and today the journal Lindleya is devoted to the study of orchids.

Elie-Abel Carrière

Carrière was one of the best-known French horticulturists in the last half of the nineteenth century. Born at May-en-Multien, France, in 1818, he began as a market gardener at Aunet before obtaining a position as gardener at Museum Nationale d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Within a short period he was the head gardener and would serve in the position until 1869. Although he published some minor works on gardening, his best known works were the two editions on conifers, the first published in 1855 and the second in 1867. It was from his knowledge of conifers in the garden, where he could make detailed comparisons, that he came to establish both the genus Tsuga and Pseudotsuga. From 1867 until his death in 1896, Carrière was the editor of the journal Revue horticole, one of the more significant horticultural journals of the nineteenth century.

George Bishop Sudworth

Ceorge Bishop Sudworth began his career in American forestry with the Division of Forestry, the forerunner of the United States Forest Service. Born in 1864, he graduated from the University of Michigan in 1885 and served as an instructor in botany there the following year. His move to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1886, heralded the start of his interest in North American trees. As the nation’s dendrologist his 1897 paper, entitled “Nomenclature of the arborescent flora of the United States,” was published in volume 14 of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Bulletin of the Division of Forestry. This was followed in 1898 by a book on the subject entitled Check list of the forest trees of the United States, wherein he treated all trees of the country. Later that year he published Forest trees of the Pacific slope; this was augmented with 207 figures. He continued to work on the trees of different regions of the United States and began a project to map the distribution of the major forest species. Only that for the genus Pinus was ever published (in 1913) by him; Elbert Little (see below) would publish additional volumes of maps starting more than a half-century later. His revision of the Check list in 1927 just before his death was to serve the United States government until the early 1950s.

Charles Sargent

In a sense, one could christen Charles Sargent as an American—specifically Bostonian—“gentleman of leisure.” Born in 1841 to a wealthy family, he graduated from Harvard University in 1862 and then served in the Civil War until 1865, after which he spent three years traveling in Europe. In 1870, Sargent became the professor of horticulture at Harvard and in 1879 was appointed the Arnold professor of arboriculture, he remained in this position until he died in 1927. Sargent was the founder and first director of the Arnold Arboretum that came into existence in 1872. Through his efforts the Arboretum acquired a massive herbarium (in part the result of his many trips and through its support of numerous collectors) and one of the finest collections of botanical books in the United States. Both the library and the herbarium significantly augmented the already excellent botanical collections and library associated with the University’s herbarium.

Sargent published four significant works. The first was his 14 volumes of The silva of North America that was published from 1890 to 1902. Each of the species he treated was figured in detail with large, elegant drawings typically based on living material. The descriptions were augmented with comments on the use and history of each species phrased in superb prose. He wrote of the men and women who discovered and named the species, where the trees could be found in arboreta, and their importance in the long-term conservation of the land. His two-volume Trees and shrubs was aimed primarily at the arborist interested in growing new or little known woody plants. His Manual of the trees of North America (exclusive of Mexico), published in 1905, followed by a second edition in 1922, was to serve as the primary field manual for the trees of the United States and Canada for nearly a half century. Finally, from 1913 through 1917, in three volumes, Sargent published with others Plantae wilsonianae. Here he and his colleagues described and in many cases named the woody flora of western China based on the explorations of Ernest Henry Wilson 1876-1930), one of the greatest plant explorers of the twentieth century.

Elbert Luther Little, Jr.

Albert Luther Little, Jr., born in 1907, is today the dean of American dendrologists. Long associated with the United States Forest Service, he basically replaced Sudworth as the one person the United States government depended upon to render taxonomic judgments of the nomenclatural status of each name of the nation’s trees. A prolific writer of numerous scientific articles and books, he has also written for the general public and especially American foresters. While now in his 90s and no longer active in systematic botany, he remains a valuable source of personal knowledge about America’s forests. He has mapped, and seen, most of them. His 1953 and 1979 Check list of native and naturalized trees of the United States (including Alaska) remain important sources for both common and scientific names of our forest trees.

Charles François Brisseau de Mirbel

Charles François Brisseau de Mirbel was born in 1776 and at age twelve was associated with the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris as a botanist. For much of the same time, he was head gardener at Malmaison, an estate garden of some note. After serving with Louis Napoléon in Holland from 1806 until 1810, he remained quietly outside the field of botany until 1829, when he returned to the Muséum to assume the title of professeur de culture. He then published numerous papers primarily on plant anatomy and physiology. His 18-volume work, Histoire naturelle, gènèrale et particulière, des plantes (1802-1806), was part of a larger 64-volume encyclopedic work on natural history edited by Count Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788). Mirbel died in 1854 with many projects in plant systematics unfinished, but with a reputation as a distinguished botanist.