Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica oe 
newed governmental investment in natural history institutions (McCook, 1999). In the 
late 1960s, the intrepid geographer Arthur Weston (b. 1932) made numerous critical 
plant collections in the course of his solitary rambles in the high Talamancas, and Roy 
W. Lent, a student at the University of Oklahoma who settled in Costa Rica, launched 
a 10-year period of botanizing in rich and previously unexplored sites on the Caribbean 
slope. While still a graduate student at Iowa State University, agrostologist Gerrit 
Davidse (b. 1942) spent 1968-1969 in Costa Rica collecting with his advisor Richard 
W. Pohl, a collaboration that would come to 
fruition in treatments of Poaceae for Flora 
costaricensis (Pohl, 1980), the flora of the 
La Selva Biological Station (Judziewicz 
& Pohl, 1984), and Flora mesoamericana 
(Davidse & Pohl, 1994). Davidse had be- 
come interested in tropical grasses as a stu- 
dent in OTS 66-4. 
In 1970, botanist and renaissance man 
Luis Diego Gémez became director of the 
Museo Nacional, and began a revitalization 
program crowned by the construction of a 
modern facility to house the herbarium. One 
of his first acts (in 1972) was the founding 
of the journal Brenesia. Urbane, visionary, 
and multilingual, G6mez played a critical 
role in fostering international collaboration 
by supervising the research of several Amer- 
ican Peace Corps volunteers, e.g., Valerie J. 
Dryer, Carol Todzia (b. 1955), John Utley, RR ei es a 
and Kathleen Burt-Utley and by encourag- 
ing and facilitating the efforts of innumerable visiting foreign botanists. Together with 
his cousin, botanist Jorge G6mez-Laurito (UCR), Gomez guided and influenced a 
generation of leading Costa Rican biologists, including entomologist and part-time 
plant collector Isidro Chacén (b. 1956), Gesneriaceae specialist Maria Marta 
Chavarria (b. 1960), and the now legendary botanist and collector Gerardo Herrera. 
Luis Diego Gomez collected prodigiously himself, and ultimately published the first 
volume of an illustrated guide to Costa Rican aquatic plants (Gémez P., 1984), as well 
as an original classification of Costa Rican vegetation types (Gémez P., 1986), com- 
plete with detailed maps. His 14-week stint on Cocos Island in 1970 (possibly the 
longest by any plant collector) resulted in a meticulously vouchered checklist of pteri- 
dophytes for the island (Gémez P., 1975a). Unfortunately, many of his specimens were 
lost when he had to leave the island suddenly due to illness (W. Burger, pers. comm.). 
In 1973, the formerly private gardens of Charles H. Lankester, near Cartago, were 
