THE DRAMATIC CAREERS 



OF TWO PLANTSMEN 



David Fairchild 



PLANTSMEN are born, and are 

 seldom or never made by educa- 

 tion. A man may be a good 

 botanist and not be a good plants- 

 man, for a botanist's interests lie in the 

 names of the plants or their morphology 

 or anatomy or cytology or in their 

 chemical constitution. He may be an 

 expert botanist and yet in the country, 

 surrounded by trees and fields of wild 

 plants, be unable to tell one species 

 from another. A plantsman, on the 

 other hand, loves plants for their own 

 sake and, as he wanders through life, 

 forms the habit of knowing the trees 

 and shrubs and weeds growing about 

 him and is not satisfied if he cannot 

 identify at least the famihes to which 

 they belong. This love goes deeper still 

 if he is a true plantsman. It makes him 

 unhappy if he is not growing plants 

 himself and watching them develop. 



The careers of two of the world's true 

 plantsmen have just closed, and in such 

 dramatic fashion that the cable des- 

 patches regarding their deaths have been 

 pubHshed throughout America: Frank 

 N. Meyer, of Amsterdam, Holland, and 

 Aaron Aaronsohn, of Haifa, Palestine — 

 the one while descending the Yangtze 

 River, the other in a fall in an aeroplane 

 off the north coast of France. 



By that strange attraction which 

 brings congenial people together, Frank 

 N. Meyer, for years the assistant to 

 Hugo de Vries in Amsterdam, drifted 

 into the organization of the Office of 

 Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, 

 became an American citizen and an 

 agricultural explorer, and Aaron Aaron- 

 sohn, Director of the first _ American 

 agricultural experiment station on the 

 shores of the Mediterranean, became a 

 foreign collaborator of the same office. 

 Through these coincidences I came to 

 know intimately these two remarkable 

 men, whose work in the discovery of 



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new plants for the use of plant breeders 

 has already become history. 



For nine years Frank Meyer wandered 

 on foot along the narrow pathways of 

 China, gathering the plants which he 

 believed would grow in America. As 

 I write of him here, his hardy yellow 

 rose, Rosa xanthina, peers in upon me 

 through my study window, and up in 

 the border his scarlet lily is in bud, 

 while the perfume of his lilac has barely 

 passed away. His white-barked pine is 

 dusting its pollen into the air, his 

 Euonymous and his hardy bamboo are 

 growing at the corners of the house, and 

 his dry-land elm with its delicate 

 branches shades the entrance. So much 

 of China has he successfully transplanted 

 to this country. 



Meyer's memory of the forms of 

 plants as they appeared in the open 

 was remarkable. In this lay his great 

 power. He could keep in his mind the 

 characters of thousands of plants — 

 many of which he had only once seen — 

 and this enabled him to recognize at 

 once any which were strangers to his 

 experience. It is this form memory, 

 inborn certainly, but trained by years of 

 solitude in forests and by long tramps 

 through the fields looking for flowers, 

 that proves such an invaluable asset in 

 the profession of an agricultural ex- 

 plorer. This, combined with the en- 

 thusiasm of a boy to whom everything 

 is new, made Meyer unique as a hunter 

 of plants. 



The plant breeders of America and of 

 all countries where the problems are 

 similar will benefit by Meyer's explora- 

 tions in many ways, for he had the tastes 

 of a plant breeder and expected, when 

 his traveling was done, to settle down 

 in a plant-breeding garden somewhere 

 in the Rocky Mountain region, where a 

 high altitude and cool weather would 

 enable him to carry on breeding work 



