Crossosoma 34(2), Fall-Winter 2008 
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Besides his work with museum specimen collection, Oscar has long had an even 
greater interest in living collections and gardens. His own yard has always been 
a sort of living collection of any and all plants that caught his attention, including 
odd or unusual weeds. For decades he has routinely gathered seeds and other 
propagules of anything new or unusual that he saw on his travels in California or 
beyond. 
He has long practiced horticultural selection in the old-fashioned manner - 
growing numerous seedlings, or tolerating volunteers, and then rogueing out 
all but the best few. By this means he developed two noteworthy varieties, one 
unfortunately now lost. The lost variety was a peach he called “Thanksgiving” 
because of its extraordinarily late time of ripening - when few other peaches 
are available locally. It was selected out of the progeny of “Miller’s Late” but 
unfortunately was infected with a virus to which it was resistant, but which made 
grafting impossible because its infected scions killed the rootstocks they were 
grafted to. Advanced tissue culture propagation techniques were considered, but 
never done. 
More successful was a mulberry now called the “Oscar” which is considered 
superior in flavor and which is both in (limited) commercial production as fresh 
fruit and in the nursery trade for home production. See for example: http://www. 
raintreenursery. com/catalog/productdetails. cfm ?ProductID =D430 
Throughout his career and his retirement, Oscar has been a mentor to younger 
botanists and naturalists. Charlotte Bringle Clarke (no relation) dedicated her 
book, Edible and Useful Plants of California (UC Press 1977) to him. Charlotte 
was a participant on two of Oscar’s trips to Mexico in 1967, along with Fred 
B. Essig, who is now a professor of Botany in Florida and an expert on palms 
and Clematis. Margriet Wetherwax (now of the UC Berkeley Herbarium) got her 
start by learning from Oscar when she was a student at UCR. Likewise, Andrew 
Sanders, who has run the UCR Herbarium since Oscar retired, was greatly 
influenced by Oscar both as a student and in the beginning of his curatorial days. 
And several thousand people have participated in UC Extension natural history 
classes, Sierra Club Nature Knowledge Workshops, Jaeger Palavers, CNPS Field 
Trips and other activities led by Oscar. 
At 90 Oscar is still actively involved with botany and horticulture and has not 
stopped his explorations of plants, especially those in his diverse garden. His 
international travels seem to have ended, but he still “travels widely in New 
Haven,” following the practice of Thoreau in continuing to investigate his own 
neighborhood. 
