A HUNTER OF PLANTS 



By David Fairchild 



Agricultural Explorer, in Charge Oeeice oe Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, 

 U. S. Department of Agriculture 



Among explorers no individual receives less recognition for signal service to 

 civilization than the hunter of plants. His name is not written upon new-found 

 lands nor upon hitherto uncharted seas. But through his vision, his daring, and 

 his fortitude he enriches the waste places of his home land and helps to feed 

 thousands of today and millions of the future. The plant-hunter is an unsung 

 Columbus of horticulture. 



IT IS one thing to go hunting for 

 wild animals and quite another to 

 go hunting for plants. In the one 

 case there is the excitement of the per- 

 sonal danger and the immediate result of 

 the game, followed by the memories that 

 crowd in as one sits before the open fire 

 and talks of the days that are past. 



In the other, the excitement of per- 

 sonal danger exists to a lesser extent, 

 there is no game to be immediately eaten, 

 but with each passing year there is the 

 increasing interest which comes from the 

 growth and spread of the plants one has 

 found and imported; the orchards or 

 avenues or fields of grain or the beauti- 

 fication of thousands of city dooryards. 



Frank N. Meyer was a plant-hunter 

 for the United States Department of 

 Agriculture. He hunted plants in China 

 and Siberia and Turkestan and in the 

 Caucasus, and he was drowned on the 

 second of June last, in the muddy waters 

 of the Yangtze River, after nine of the 

 most picturesque years that any one could 

 imagine, spent in the dense forests of 

 northern Korea, in Chinese temples 

 perched on distant sacred mountains, and 

 in wanderings through the orchards, gar- 

 dens, and cultivated fields of that vast 

 Oriental country. 



A LjFE OF ADVENTURE AND SERVICE 



What a life ! To wander with a defi- 

 nite, soul-absorbing object, on foot, from 

 village to village, inquiring his way and 

 learning as he went of some new plant 

 variety which, because of its perfume, the 

 deliciousness of its fruit, the color of its 



flowers, the shade it cast, its alkali resist- 

 ance, or its hardiness in bleak northern 

 regions, might be worthy of sending to 

 this country for our farmers, horticul- 

 turists, or lovers of dooryard plants to 

 grow. 



As Meyer stood before one of these 

 new plants to which chance and his flair 

 for new things had led his footsteps, he 

 tried to picture in his imagination the re- 

 gion in the United States where it would 

 grow ; to wonder in what particular it 

 might prove better than that which 

 Americans were then cultivating, and 

 what use they would make of it after it 

 developed to full size and produced its 

 fruit or flowers. It was his business to 

 look ahead and predict the future of his 

 discoveries. His was different work 

 from that of the botanical explorer who 

 collects for a museum, who is only look- 

 ing for species that are new and have 

 never before been collected and placed 

 in the great herbaria of dried specimens. 



While Meyer did indeed find a new 

 species of hickory, — new to science — had 

 a new lilac named after him, and added 

 thousands of specimens to the herbaria 

 of the country, his work was primarily 

 the getting of living material of culti- 

 vated useful plants or their relatives. 



He sent in hundreds of shipments of 

 living cuttings and thousands of sacks 

 filled with seeds of the useful plants of 

 the countries through which he traveled, 

 with the result that there are now grow- 

 ing in America fields and orchards and 

 avenues and hedges of Meyer's plants 

 which, could he only have lived, would 



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