Briggs, L.A.S. Johnson — a botanical career 
513 
if presented with a convincing array of evidence. Some scientists have found LJ to be a 
stern critic but others have found him a supporter. He has especially supported several 
botanists whose views were being rejected primarily for their unorthodoxy, rather than 
being rejected on evidence. In such cases LJ would call for a reconsideration of the facts. 
Shortly after Johnson's appointment at the Herbarium, Anderson was revising his 
book Trees ofNeio South Wales. LJ did much of this work, over a range of tree genera, 
(but with Mary Tindale responsible for Acacia). By that time Lawrie was married 
and his wife Merle typed large sections of the revised book, for which both of them 
received only limited acknowledgment. He did, however, receive from Anderson 
much encouragement, friendship and some insight into administration, though 
management was very different then from today's excess of managerial requirements 
that affect organisations worldwide. 
LJ soon took on the role of providing botanical expertise for the principal Australian 
tree group, the eucalypts, and this has contmued to dominate much of LJ's subsequent 
research over more than four decades. With more than 800 species now recognised, 
the eucalypts are a vast assemblage, dominating most of Australia's vegetation except 
in the arid inland. Their study is made complex by the subtle features by which 
species differ, the extent of hybridism, and the diverse patterns of wide-ranging and 
narrowly endemic or disjunct distributions. In this work LJ found compatible scientific 
approaches in Lindsay Pryor (Director of Parks and Gardens in Canberra and later 
Professor of Botany at the Australian National University) and colleagues Don Blaxell 
(later Assistant Director, Living Collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney) 
and Ken Hill (now Senior Botanist). Ian Brooker (now of Australian National 
Herbarium, CSIRO) has been another important contact in eucalypt studies. 
All these collaborators shared LJ's strong belief in the value of field studies and 
travelled extensively. With Pryor, and his colleague Dugald Paton, this sometimes 
involved extensive light aircraft trips. Decades later, when beset by back and neck 
problems (the latter from a whiplash injury while travelling from a scientific 
conference), LJ still considered it worthwhile to see species in the field. 'Just give me 
time to straighten up' would be his comment as he stiffly got out of the four-wheel 
drive vehicle on fieldwork in remote regions. 
It has been in expressing the complexities of the eucalypts that LJ has most clearly 
shown his determination that logic should override conservative conventions. Most 
eucalypt specialists have seen the value of (and used) the 'extracodical' subgenera 
and series of Pryor & Johnson (1971 and subsequent papers), although there has 
been less use than he hoped of the codes of up to six letters to summarise the 
classification of each taxon at all levels of the hierarchy. These efficient means of 
expressing groupings were largely devised by LJ, although published jointly. 
LJ has shown himself precise and particular in nomenclature, orthography and 
typification at the predominant levels of family, genus and species, and he has served 
in these areas on committees of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy. But 
he soon came to regard rigid application of the rule of priority as an irrelevant time- 
waster for taxa at intermediate levels which derive their significance only from their 
circumscription (content) in a particular classification. As he emphasises, his usages that 
do not follow the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature are extracodical rather 
than informal, they are part of a formal and precisely defined logical system. In the 
same spirit in which he determined on these usages, he welcomes many of the measures 
now being proposed by Werner Greuter, John McNeill and David Hawkesworth (e.g. 
Hawkesworth et al. 1994) to remove unnecessary instability in biological nomenclature 
— this 'senior citizen' of botany has in no way become a conservative. 
