2l8 MAGUIRE 



any living botanist of the southeast, was wholly contemporaneous with Dr, 

 Small. 



One of the most comprehensive programs of study for any sectional part 

 of the United States has been organized at the Gray Herbarium. Under the 

 sponsorship and leadership of George R. Cooley, the Gray Herbarium and 

 Arnold Arboretum have projected a long-term study of the flora of the 

 southeastern states, which will utilize the efforts of the Harvard taxonomic 

 staffs and draw on the collaboration of many prominent resident southern 

 botanists, among them Wilbur Duncan in Georgia, A. E. Radford and his 

 associates in North Carolina, A. J. Sharp in Tennessee, James D. Ray in 

 Mississippi, John A. Moore in northern Louisiana, and D. M. Moore in 

 Arkansas. This well-conceived operation, to be based on thorough new field 

 exploration, has as its objective the ultimate publication of three manuals 

 treating the flora of the southeast, viz., (1) a study of the genera of the 

 southeast, (2) the production of a conventional-type manual, and (3) a 

 manual of cultivated plants. 



Per Axel Rydberg, of gentle, modest disposition, has never had an adequate 

 or sympathetic biographer. Ewan (Rocky Mountain Naturalists, 1950) 

 wrote: "No single botanist is more critically involved in the history of the 

 study of the Rocky Mountain flora than Rydberg." Indeed, as an explorer 

 and a writer, the productivity of no other student of western botany can 

 compare with that of Rydberg. 



First of all a field man, Rydberg collected widely from 1891 until nearly 

 1930, earlier in the Rocky Mountain area from Montana to New Mexico 

 and Utah and later in the Great Plains states. His field excursions, despite his 

 lameness, reached into remote and difficult places, many of them not since 

 effectively botanized. Numerically his collections were prodigious. Unfor- 

 tunately, there is no adequate tabulation of his field operations. In addition 

 to numerous critical taxonomic studies, he became the most prolific writer of 

 major floras of his generation, all of which were based most importantly on 

 his own collections. Successively he wrote the Flora of Montana and Yellow- 

 stone Park (1900), Flora of Colorado (1906), Flora of the Rocky Mountains 

 and Adjacent Plains (1917), and Flora of the Prairies and Plains of Central 

 North America (1932, published posthumously). 



Aven Nelson, contemporary of Rydberg's, whose life span as an active field 

 botanist exceeds that of all other outstanding western botanists, collected 

 extensively in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. 

 He remained tireless in the field. I cherish the memory of a week's collecting 

 in the Baboquivari Mountains in southern Arizona with Nelson, his able 

 student and colleague N. L. Goodding, and my old professor, K. M. Wie- 

 gand. Nelson, at the age of eighty years, visited (with Ruth Ashton Nelson) 

 Mount McKinley, Alaska, in 1939, where he proposed to collect materials 

 upon which to base a flora of the Mount McKinley National Park. 



