Manual de Plantas de Costa Rica a7 
country. After becoming director of the 
Missouri Botanical Garden in 1971, Raven 
continued to pursue that institution’s long- 
standing program in Panama, while main- 
taining strong connections and an abiding 
interest in Costa Rica. Soon, other MO bot- 
anists were turning their attention more se- 
riously to Costa Rica, including Thomas B. 
Croat (b. 1938), Alwyn H. Gentry, Ronald 
L. Liesner (b. 1944), Gerrit Davidse, and 
W. D. Stevens (b. 1944). Croat (another for- 
mer OTS 65-4 student) made the first col- 
lections from the Burica Peninsula (Croat, 
1981), together with Liesner, and has re- 
turned to the country many times since. 
Gentry collected prodigiously along tran- 
sects in disparate parts of Costa Rica, dis- 
covering many country records in the pro- 
cess; his unbridled energy and enthusiasm _ Peter H. Raven (b. 1936) _ 
: : Missouri Botanical Garden archives 
would ultimately confer an unrivaled knowl- 
edge of the Neotropical flora, left for pos- 
terity in the form of a much used regional field guide (Gentry, 1993). Liesner, who had 
previously collected in Costa Rica with William Burger while employed at Chicago’s 
Field Museum, worked especially in the Osa Peninsula and Guanacaste, and coauth- 
ored a checklist of vascular plants (exclusive of grasses) for the Guanacaste lowlands 
(Janzen & Liesner, 1980). Agrostologist Gerrit Davidse spearheaded an intensive and 
systematic botanical exploration of the higher portions of the Cordillera de Talamanca 
in 1983 and 1984, with funding from the National Geographic Society (NGS). This ef- 
fort, one of the most important collecting ventures in the history of Costa Rican botany, 
involved (among others) Costa Rican botanists Luis Diego G6mez, Gerardo Herrera, 
and Isidro Chac6n, as well as Michael Grayum and botanist Richard H. Warner 
(b. 1952), then of The Nature Conservancy. Shortly thereafter, W. D. Stevens conducted 
a similarly thorough NGS-funded inventory of the Barra del Colorado region, in the far 
northeastern corner of the country, in conjunction with Davidse and Herrera. 
With the completion of the Flora of Panama in 1980, the Missouri Botanical Gar- 
den could devote more resources to other projects. In 1984, Michael Grayum and Barry 
Hammel were hired to begin work on the Manual de plantas de Costa Rica, conceived 
by Peter Raven during his travels in Costa Rica. Grayum moved immediately to Costa 
Rica (where he resided until late 1990). The first organizational meeting for the Man- 
ual project was held in St. Louis in August 1984. The initial phase of the project was 
devoted largely to collecting and exploration, funded principally by NSF. The re- 
