Volume 47 Number 4 Fall 1987

Arnoldia (ISSN 0004-2633; USPS 866-100) is pub-lished quarterly, in winter, spring, summer, and fall,by the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.

Subscriptions are $12.00 per calendar year domestic,$15.00 per calendar year foreign, payable in advance.Single copies are $3.50. All remittances must be inU. S. dollars, by check drawn on a LC S. bank or byinternational money order. Send subscription orders,remittances, change-of-address notices, and all othersubscription-related communications to: Helen G.Shea, Circulation Manager, Arnoldia, The ArnoldArboretum, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130-2795. Tele-phone (617)524-1718.

Postmaster: Send address changes to:ArnoldiaThe Arnold ArboretumJamaica Plain, MA 02130-2795.

Copyright © 1987, The President and Fellows ofHarvard College.

Edmund A. Schofield, EditorPeter Del Tredici, Associate EditorHelen G. Shea, Circulation ManagerMarion D. Cahan, Editorial Assistant (Volunteer)

Arnoldia is printed by the Office of the UniversityPublisher, Harvard University.

Front cover:-Painting of the Georgia plume (Elliottiaracemosa Muhlenberg ex Elliott) by Esther Heins. Usedthrough the artist’s generosity. (See page 2.) Inside front tcover :-Susan Delano McKelvey (1883-1964). Photo-graph used through the courtesy of Jon Katherine Mc-Kelvey. (See page 9.) This page:-Photograph of Syringavulgaris ’Amethyst’ taken by Susan Delano McKelveyfor her treatise The Lilac (1928) (Pi.n~ caoav) (top), and ofOpuntia acanthocarpa Engelmann, Mazatzal Range,Arizona, photographed by Susan Delano McKelvey onMay 12, 1929 (bottom). Both photographs are from theArchives of the Arnold Arboretum. (See page 9.) Insideback cover :-Portrait of Kirk Boott (1755-1817) fromthe collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society.(See page 24.) Back cover:-Photograph of Alice East-wood (1859-1953), the California botanist, on the roadto Sunflower Mine, Mazatzal Range, Arizona. The pho-tograph is from the Archives of the Arnold Arboretum.It was taken by Susan Delano McKelvey on May 26,1929; part of her automobile appears at the right edgeof the photograph. (See page 9.) (

Page2 Lost and Found: Elliottia racemosa

Peter Del Tredici

9 A Life Redeemed: Susan Delano McKelveyand the Arnold ArboretumEdmund A. Schofield

24 Kirk Boott and the Greening of Boston,1783-1845

Alan Emmet

35 Index to Volume 47

Lost and Found: Elliottia racemosa

Peter Del Tredici

More common than once thought, the Georgia plume is slowly yielding itssecrets to persistent biologists

When a plant has a limited distribution in thewild, one is tempted to think either that it hassome highly specific habitat requirementthat is not often met or has traits that limit itsability to compete successfully with otherplants. One can never predict, however, howa rare plant will respond to cultivation out-side its native range. A case in point is Ginkgobiloba, a tree native to China that, althoughextinct in the wild, is ubiquitous in cultiva-tion throughout the temperate regions of theworld. In North America, the pink shellazalea, Rhododendron vaseyi, has a very lim-ited range in the southern AppalachianMountains yet is widely and successfullycultivated throughout the East Coast.

At the opposite end of the spectrum isElliottia racemosa, the Georgia plume, asmall tree with a very limited range both inthe wild and in cultivation. Its native habitatis in the sandhills of eastern and south-cen-tral Georgia. This unusual member of theEricaceae can reach heights of up to thirty-five feet (10.7 m) and have a trunk up totwelve inches (30 cm) wide. It is strikinglybeautiful when in bloom, its pure-white ra-cemes standing high above the bright-greenfoliage. The flowers are remarkably uneri-caceous in appearance, having four or five free

Elliottia racemosa Muhlenberg ex Elliott, the Georgiaplume:-A flowering branch (I); vertical section of aflower (2); a flower with its corolla and stamens re-moved (3); front, side, and rear views of a stamen (4);and a cross-section of an ovary. From Garden and Forest,Volume 7 (1894), page 205.

petals that are not fused to form a corollatube, a trait that marks it as more "primitive"than other members of the family (Bohn et al.,1978). In its native Georgia, Elliottia bloomsfrom the middle of June to the end of July. Theplant comes into flower progressively later asone moves farther north.

In spite of all its positive horticultural at-tributes-its beautiful flowers, good fallcolor, and hardiness to minus ten Fahrenheit(-23 C)-Elliottia is very rare in cultivation.This neglect is all the more amazing whenone considers that the plant was first discov-ered over two hundred years ago, in 1773, byWilliam Bartram (Ewan, 1968) and was de-scribed by Gotthilf Muhlenberg in 1817, whonamed it in honor of Stephen Elliott. A cur-sory perusal of the literature quickly revealsthe source of the problem: in the wild,Elliottia is very shy about forming fruit, soshy, in fact, that until 1903-one hundredthirty years after Bartram’s discovery-nomature capsule had been found in nature or incultivation, and then only an empty one.More amazing still is the fact that no ripeseeds were discovered until 1934, and eventhese seeds contained only "imperfect em-bryos" (Wherry, 1936).On top of this difficulty with seed produc-

tion, the plant is considered difficult to trans-plant, and early efforts to collect specimensfrom the wild generally failed, with the no-table exception of "three or four plants" col-lected by Asa Gray near Augusta, Georgia, in1875 and planted out on the grounds of the

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P. J. Berckmans’s Nursery outside that city(Sargent, 1902). For many years, these werethe only known cultivated specimens of Elli-ottia. They were last reported alive, but inpoor health, in 1923 (Trudell, 1926). Thisdifficulty with transplanting is somewhatsurprising, given the fact that in the wild theplant suckers freely from its roots, particu-larly in response to injury or disturbance,such as fire. The early propagations of Elliot-tia probably involved digging up just suchyoung root sprouts.

In the early 1900s botanists renewed thesearch for Elliottia, discovering several newcolonies (Harper, 1903; Trudell, 1926, 1929).Their finds stimulated the interest of horti-culturists, and cultivated plants were re-

ported growing at Kew Gardens, England, in1902 (sent there by Berckmans’s Nursery)(Prain, 1912); at the Biltmore Forest in Ashe-ville, North Carolina, in 1934 (Knight, 1938);and at the Henry Foundation in Gladwyne,Pennsylvania, in 1936 (Henry, 1941). Nodoubt many other specimens have been andstill are in cultivation, but these are amongthe oldest and historically most significant.

EcologyWhile early botanical authors considered EI-liottia to be "one of the rarest North Ameri-can trees" (Sargent, 1902), more modern re-search has shown this not to be the case.Since the 1950s, Dr. George Rogers of Geor-gia Southern College and Dr. John Bozemanof the Georgia Department of Natural Re-sources have discovered about thirty newlocations where the plant grows. In all, Boze-man estimates, there are about seventy dis-tinct sites for Elliottia, all in Georgia. Somestands are as small as twenty feet by twentyfeet, while others cover many acres. Almostall of them are located along the Altamaha,Ocmulgee, and Canoochee rivers or theirtributaries. The Big Hammock Natural Areain Tattnall County, containing nearly fourhundred acres of Elliottia, is one of the bestplaces to see the plant. Currently, Elliottia is

Portrait of Stephen Elliott. From the Archives of theArnold Arboretum.

considered too common to be granted "rareand endangered" status by the United StatesFish and Wildlife Service, but the state ofGeorgia classified it "endangered" in 1977and has protected it ever since.As far as seed production in the wild goes,

Dr. Bozeman has found that the smaller thecolony the less the likelihood that it will pro-duce seed. The large colonies he is familiarwith "all produce seed on a regular basis." Ac-cording to Bozeman, the root-suckering habitof Elliottia may partially explain the vagariesof seed production. He postulates that thosepopulations that set viable seed (generallyspeaking, the large ones) consist of more thanone genetically distinct clone, while popula-tions that don’t (the small ones) are mono-clonal. This lack of genetic diversity inhibitsoutcrossing and therefore limits their seed

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Elliottia racemosa. From Curtis’s Botanical Magazine(1912).

production. Over time, these smaller, in-

breeding populations would become ho-mozygous for a wider variety of recessivetraits, including self-incompatibility, thanthe larger, outcrossing populations.

Another factor that probably affectsElliottia’s ability to produce viable seed wasdiscovered by Dr. Frank S. Santamour.Elliottia pollen, he reported in 1967, was onlyfive to six percent viable when the flowerswere opening. He postulated that this lowviability may be due to the accumulation of

recessive lethal or sublethal genes as a resultof extensive inbreeding.

Seed GerminationThe first break in the propagation of Elliottiacame in 1941, when Mary Henry, of theHenry Foundation, published the first illus-tration of ripe Elliottia fruit (a photograph ofripe fruit produced by a plant growing in hergarden at Gladwyne, Pennsylvania). Accom-panying the picture is the cryptic caption: "Ithas been considered sterile to its own pollenbut no other Elliottia was growing near thisplant." Unfortunately, Henry does not men-tion fruit formation in the body of her articleor whether she ever tried to germinate theseeds it contained.The first successful germination of Elliot-

tia seed was reported by Alfred J. Fordham ofthe Arnold Arboretum (Fordham, 1969). Hewas able to raise five seedlings from wild-collected seeds sent to him in 1964. At thetime, however, he could not determine thenature of their seed-dormancy mechanism. Inanother article, published in 1981, Fordhamcleared up the problem. He reported thatElliottia seed required a chilling period inorder to germinate and recommended threemonths’s cold stratification in order to breaktheir dormancy. Unfortunately, he did notpublish data on the percentages of germina-tion.

Fordham also reported success in rootingthe young shoots that sprouted from pieces ofElliottia roots removed from a large plant inMarch and planted in a warm greenhouse.This propagation technique takes advantageof the natural tendency of the plant to pro-duce root suckers in the wild.

In 1985, I undertook a series of germina-tion tests to determine exactly how muchchilling the seeds required. The seeds that Iused in the tests were produced by the ArnoldArboretum’s lone plant, #977-62, whichHenry Hohman of Kingsville Nurseries,Kingsville, Maryland, had donated to the Ar-boretum in 1962, when it was nine feet (2.75

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m) tall. Because it was the Arboretum’s onlyplant and was of questionable hardiness, ithad been moved indoors each winter fornearly ten years before being planted out-of-doors in 1972. Since then, the plant has grownwell and is now a healthy, single-trunkedspecimen, still nine feet (2.75 m) tall and fourfeet ( 1.2 m) wide. While this plant has oftenproduced seed capsules, seed collected fromthese capsules generally have failed to germi-nate. However, in 1985, an unusually heavycrop of fruit was produced, and these wereharvested on 21 October for a series of germi-nation tests. The test was set up with only theviable seeds-that is, seeds having largeembryos. All seeds lacking embryos werediscarded.From our one plant, we collected three

hundred sixty viable seeds, dividing theminto four lots of ninety seeds. On 28 October,we either sowed seeds directly in a green-house kept at a minimum temperature ofsixty-five Fahrenheit (18.5 C) or placed themin small polyethylene bags containing moiststratification medium (fifty percent sand andfifty percent peat moss) and chilled them in arefrigerator at thirty-six Fahrenheit (2 C). Atintervals, we removed the bags from the coldand sowed the seeds they contained in a warmgreenhouse (sixty-five Fahrenheit) (21 C),with the following results:

Number

Days of Cold Days to First of Seeds PercentageLot Stratiftcation Germmation Germmated Germmauon

1 0 56 1 1

2 42 19 64 71

3 66 21 1 66 73

4 64 21 1 74 82

Nmety seeds per lot.

Elliottia seeds require a moist chillingperiod of about one month to stimulate ger-mination. This stands in contrast to the be-havior of the seeds of most species of Rhodo-dendron, which require light but not chillingfor germination. In this regard, however, itshould be noted that tests with the seeds ofvarious Rhododendron species have shown

Mature fruit capsules and viable seeds of Elliottiaracemosa collected from the wild in Georgia on October6, 1987, by Dr. George Rogers. The scale at the bottomof the figure is in millimeters. Photographed by PeterDel Tredici.

that, while they don’t absolutely require achilling period to germinate, subjecting themto one month’s stratification before sowingboth accelerated the rate and increased thepercentage of germination.

It is not clear what the significance is of thefact that isolated specimens of Elliottia incultivation have often been reported to setviable seed (Henry, 1941; Fordham, 1981). ).Obviously, one cannot simply say that lowseed-set in the wild is entirely due to self-incompatibility. It is important to realize thatboth the Arboretum’s plant, which set closeto four hundred viable seeds in 1985, and theplant investigated by Frank Santamour in1966, only 5.5 percent of whose pollen wasviable, came from Henry Hohman ofKingsville Nurseries in Maryland.

While it is not known whether these twoHohman plants are sibling seedlings or iden-tical vegetative propagations, they probablyhave very similar genetic backgrounds. As-suming this to be the case, it seems likely thatclimatic factors during bud set in the fall orfloral development in the spring might inter-

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Elliottia racemosa flowering in the Arnold Arboretum.Photographed by Peter Del Tredici.

act with genetic factors to determine pollenviability. This would mean that in the yearSantamour did his testing, pollen viabilitywas low, while in 1985, when the Arboretumplant set copious seed, viability was consid-erably higher than that. Obviously, morestudies of the matter are called for.

CultivationGiven the fact that the proper treatment ofElliottia seeds is now known, one is temptedto say that the last impediment to its widercultivation has been removed, but sadly thisis not the case. Propagators throughout theEast Coast have reported that, even whenseed is available, many seedlings die fromPhytophthora fungus infection (damp-off).

Luckily, we did not experience such lossesto damp-off with our seedlings at the ArnoldArboretum. This may be due to the fact thatat the time of their potting up in May 1986, Icollected several handfuls of soil from underthe mother plant with pieces of Elliottia rootincluded. I forced this soil through a screenand then mixed it with the sand and peatmoss mix used for potting the seedling into.l ILosses have been minimal, and most plantsare now about four to five inches tall. I did thisbased on the assumption that Elliottia was nodifferent from many other members of theEricaceae in being dependent on "ericoid"mycorrhizae for their proper growth anddevelopment. All of our container-grownplants show extensive mycorrhizal develop-ment, which is undoubtedly involved in theuptake of a wide variety of mineral nutri-ents-in particular phosphorus and nitro-gen-from the sterile, sandy soils in which itnaturally grows (Read, 1983).

These seedlings are now being offered forsale to the readers of Arnoldia for $25 each.The plants are all between four and six inchestall and will be shipped in the spring of 1988.If possible, the plant should have another yearor two in a container before planting out. Anysite with at least fifty percent sun and welldrained, sandy soil enriched with peat mossor leaf mould will do fine. Like other mem-bers of the Ericaceae, Elliottia must have acidsoil.

How To Order SeedlingsPlease do not prepay orders; send paymentonly after your seedling arrives. Direct yourorder to:

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Elliottia DistributionArnold ArboretumJamaica Plain, MA 02130-2795.

Endnote1. The idea to do this was stimulated by discussions

with the late Edmund Mezitt of Weston Nurseries, inHopkinton, Massachusetts, who told me that his se-cret to successful germination (and subsequentgrowth) of Rhododendron seed was to mix a handfulof screened soil taken from under a wild-growingRhododendron with the standard peat-sand seed-germination mix used in the greenhouse.

AcknowledgmentsI thank Dr. John Bozeman of the Georgia Department ofNatural Resources for carefully reviewing the manu-script, and Mr. Robert McCartney of Woodlanders, In-corporated, Aiken, South Carolina, for his helpful obser-vations.

ReferencesBohn, B. A., S. W. Brim, R. J. Hebda, and P. F. Stevens.

1978. Generic limits in the tribe Cladotham-neae (Ericaceae), and its position in the Rho-dodendroideae. Journal of the Arnold Arbo-retum, Volume 59, Number 4, pages 311 to341.

Elliott, S. 1971. A Sketch of the Botany of South Caro-lina and Georgia. Introduction by JosephEwan. New York: Hafner Publishing Com-pany. [Reprint of the 1821 edition.]

Ewan, Joseph. 1968. William Bartram: Botanical andZoological Drawings, 1756-1788. Memoirs ofthe American Philosophical Society, Volume74, pages 1 to180.

Fordham, Alfred J. 1969. Elliottia racemosa and its

propagation. Arnoldia, Volume 29, Number 3,pages 17 to 20.. 1981. Elliottia-propagational data for

four species. International Plant PropagatorsSociety Proceedings, Volume 31, pages 436 to440.

Harper, R. M. 1902. Notes on Elliottia racemosa. PlantWorld, Volume 5, Number 5, pages 87 to 90.. 1903a. Two new stations for Elliottia.

Plant World, Volume 6, Number 3, page 60.

. 1903b. Elliottia racemosa again. Tor-reya, Volume 3, Number 7, page 106.

Henry, M. G. 1941. Elliottia racemosa. National Horti-cultural Magazine, Volume 20, Number 3,pages 223 to 226.

Knight, W. A. 1938. A rare American shrub. Bulletin ofPopular Information of the Arnold Arbore-tum, Series 4, Volume 4, Number 2, pages 7 to13.

Mellinger, M. B. 1967. The lost Elliottia. The AmericanHorticultural Magazine, Volume 46, Number2, pages 94 to 95.

Prain, D. 1912. Elliottia racemosa. Curtis’s BotanicalMagazine, Volume 138, Number 85, Plate8413.

Read, D. J. 1983. The biology of mycorrhiza in theEricales. Canadian Journal of Botany, Volume61, Number 3, pages 985 to 1004.

Santamour, Frank S., Jr. 1967. Cytology and sterility inElliottia racemosa. Morris Arboretum

Bulletin, Volume 18, Number 3, pages 60 to63.

Sargent, Charles Sprague, 1894. Elliottia racemosa.Garden and Forest, Volume 7, Number 326,page 206.

. 1902. The Silva of North America, Vol-ume 14, pages 29 to 32.

Sealey, J. R. 1938. Elliottia racemosa. New Flora andSilva, Volume 10, Number3, pages 154 to 164.

Small, J. K. 1901. The rediscovery of Elliottia. Journal ofthe New York Botanical Garden, Volume 2,Number 7, pages 113 to 114.

Trudell, H. W. 1925-1926. Rescuing Elliottia. Bartonia,Number 9, pages 11 to 15.. 1927-1928. A new colony of Elliottia.

Bartonia, Number 10, pages 24 to 27.Wherry, Edgar T. 1935. Discovery of Elliottia seed. Bar-

tonia, Number 17, page 51.Wood, Carroll E., Jr. 1961. The genera of Ericaceae in the

southeastem United States. Journal of theArnold Arboretum, Volume 42, Number 1,pages 10 to 80 (Elliottia, pages 20 to 23~.

Peter Del Tredici is the Arnold Arboretum’s AssistantPlant Propagator. He writes frequently for Amoldia andother horticultural and botanical publications.

A Life Redeemed: Susan Delano McKelvey and theArnold Arboretum

Edmund A. Schofield

Fleeing a broken marriage in middle age, a wealthy New York socialite cameto Boston and created a wholly new life as botanist at the Arnold Arboretum

Towards the end of the First World War therecame to the Arnold Arboretum a thirty-six-year-old woman whose life had just fallen topieces. To be sure, she could command re-sources to cushion the fall that no ordinaryperson could-great wealth, family name,social prominence-but those resources hadbeen powerless to prevent it. A native ofPhiladelphia, a graduate of Bryn Mawr Col-lege, and a member of New York’s social elite(she was, for example, a cousin of President-to-be Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the womanhad married a New York attorney in 1907, set-tling into a comfortable life on Long Island aswife, mother, andsocialite. But the Great Warsoon called her husband away to Washington,D. C., and in 1916 one of her two young sonsdied. At war’s end, upon her husband’s return,their marriage broke up. No doubt to escapethe tempest their separation would cause inNew York society, she fled to Boston, whereshe apparently had relatives (she was de-scended from the Adamses of nearby Brain-tree, for example, and from the Bradfords ofPlymouth). In Boston she would create forherself an entirely new life: she would be-come, of all things, a botanist.

Her training in this new and unfamiliarfield started literally from scratch. Not longafter arriving in Boston she approached Pro-fessor Charles Sprague Sargent, the foundingDirector of the Arnold Arboretum, about thepossibility of working as a volunteer at the

Arboretum-perhaps as a means of forgettingher marital troubles. She wanted to studylandscape architecture, too. In any event,"The Professor," as she came to call Sargent,set her to washing clay pots in theArboretum’s greenhouses, to test her resolve.Presently, at Sargent’s urging, she began tostudy the plants on the grounds of the Arbo-retum and in its greenhouses under the tute-lage of William H. Judd (1861-1949), who wasthe Arboretum’s propagator.

Early on, she took a particular interest inthe lilac collection, just then under develop-ment. For the next four and a half decades, inone capacity or another, this dedicated, re-sourceful, and indefatigable woman was af-filiated with the Arnold Arboretum. Duringthose decades, which seem to have beenhappy ones, she became a respected botanist,making many collecting forays to the westernUnited States and writing three scholarlyworks in her chosen field. Upon Sargent’sdeath in 1927, perhaps out of gratitude for hisand the Arboretum’s crucial aid in rehabili-tating her life, she and her brothers-one ofthem an internationally known architect-contributed generously to the Arboretum’sendowment.

Ultimately, she became a member of theArboretum’s Visiting Committee and a

staunch champion of the Arboretum duringthe painful and divisive court battle of the1950s and 1960s, the so-called "Arnold Arbo-

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return controversy." Her name was SusanAdams Delano McKelvey, nee Susan MagounDelano. Until now, few details of her life havebeen known. Here, in brief, then, is her life’sstory, reconstructed from evidence scatteredfrom California and Mexico to Boston, NewYork, and Philadelphia.

Her Early Years: 1883-1919 9Susan Adams Delano (as she preferred to beknown) was born Susan Magoun Delano inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 13,1883, of "pure New England ancestry-par-sons, shipbuilders and shipowners, school-masters, bankers, and so forth"-to use herbrother William’s phrase. She was the fifthchild of Eugene Delano (a merchant andbanker) and Susan Magoun Adams Delano.Her maternal grandfather, the Reverend Wil-liam Adams (1807-1880; Yale, 1830), hadbeen instrumental in founding Union Theo-logical Seminary in New York and, from 1873until his death, had served as its president.While Susan Delano was yet a child the fam-ily left Philadelphia for New York City,where she grew up. Entering Bryn MawrCollege’s Class of 1906 early in the new cen-tury, she majored in English and French. Inher freshman and senior years she played onher class field hockey team. Taking not asingle botany or biology course, she usedinstead the first-year geology course to fulfillher science requirement. In 1907 she gradu-ated.On October 8, 1907, she married a young

attorney, Charles Wylie McKelvey (1878-1957), and moved with him to an estate ("tenacres on which there is a remodeled whiteframe colonial house, large farm group andtwo cottages") in Oyster Bay, Long Island,only a few miles from Syosset, home of herbrother, William Adams Delano (1874-1960),an architect. Her husband and her brothersWilliam (who was affectionately known as"Billy") and Moreau (1877-1936; a banker) allwere graduates of Yale (classes of 1900, 1895,and 1898, respectively); at Yale, all had been

Susan Delano in 1898, at about the age of fifteen years.Photograph courtesy of Jon Katherine McKelvey.

members of the Scroll and Key senior society,and it was no doubt through the society andher brother Moreau that she met her husband,Charles.

After graduating from Yale, Billy studied atthe Columbia University School of Architec-ture and then at the E,cole des Beaux-Arts inParis, from which he received a diplomein 1902. Returning to New York, Billy and hisfriend Chester Holmes Aldrich (1871-1940)founded the architectural firm of Delano &Aldrich in 1903. In the same year he beganteaching design at Columbia. Over the nextseveral decades Billy Delano would establisha national and international reputation as anarchitect. He would design vast estates onLong Island, embassies in Paris and Washing-ton, the Post Office in Washington, D. C., and

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Portrait of William Adams Delano (1874-1960), SusanDelano McKelvey’s elder brother, by Dunbar Beck.Courtesy of the National Academy of Design.

the Venice Art Gallery; in 1948, at the requestof President Truman, he would design thesecond-story balcony in the south portico ofthe White House. From 1949 until 1952would be consulting architect to theCommission on the Renovation of the Execu-tive Mansion and from 1929 until 1946 amember of the National Capital Park andPlanning Commission. In 1958, toward theend of his long and productive life, he wouldbe able to declare in an interview with theNew Yorker magazine that "I’ve known everyPresident of the United States from TeddyRoosevelt to the present day, except Har-ding."Some time during the 1910s (the record is

unclear on the exact date) the Delanos-Billy,Moreau, and Susan McKelvey-apparentlybecame benefactors of the Arnold Arbore-tum, responding perhaps to one of Charles

Sprague Sargent’s annual funding appeals.Though the record is unclear on this point andan exact chronology probably irretrievable, itseems likely that there was some kind ofconnection between the Delanos and theArboretum before Mrs. McKelvey retreatedto Boston in 1919. Perhaps her brother Wil-liam, being an architect and therefore inter-ested in the use of plants for landscaping, hadmade the initial contact in the course of someroutine business. In any event, once in BostonSusan Delano McKelvey was able to startrebuilding her shattered life with the indis-pensable help of Charles Sprague Sargent andthe Arnold Arboretum.

In Lilac Time: 1919-1928Once Sargent had given her the initial nudge,McKelvey threw herself wholeheartedly intomastering the various aspects of botany,maintaining her zeal for the subject virtuallyuntil her death in 1964. She began her careerin classic fashion by participating in a botani-cal "expedition," an arduous, five-week col-lecting trip to Glacier National Park in Au-gust and September 1921. Years before (in the1880s) Charles Sargent had recommendedthat the area and its "appallingly grand" scen-ery "be set aside as a forest preserve." Mc-Kelvey was accompanied by her survivingson, thirteen-year-old Delano McKelvey(1908-1965); Professor John G. Jack (1896-1935) of the Arnold Arboretum; and a man sheidentified in her diary only as "Mr. Dall."(Dall may have been a son of William HealyDall [ 1845-1927], the paleontologist who hadworked at the Smithsonian Institution andafter whom the Dall’s sheep was named. Anative of Boston, the elder Dall had studiedwith Louis Agassiz at Harvard and hadworked in the West and Alaska in his youngerdays. Less likely, "Mr. Dall" may have beenCurtis B. Dall, a son-in-law-to-be of FranklinDelano Roosevelt, whose daughter he mar-ried in 1926.) In any event, "Mr. Dall" was theexpedition’s official photographer. Many ofhis photographs, "taken for Mrs. Susan De-

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lano McKelvey," are preserved in the Ar-chives of the Arnold Arboretum.

Travelling by train from New York City,the party passed through Cleveland, northernIndiana, and Chicago; crossed the Missis-sippi ; and proceeded to Saint Paul, where theyboarded the Great Northern Railroad for thelast leg of the trip, passing through NorthDakota and thence into Montana. All duringthe trip, Susan McKelvey took careful noteson the landscape and plants she saw from thetrain’s window, notes that show she wasprogressing well in her study of botany. Afterthree days of travel they were in GlacierNational Park.

Because little botanical work had beendone in the gargantuan, million-acre Parksince it was established in 1910, the expedi-tion offered an opportunity for making origi-nal contributions to botany. Travelling firstby bus and then afoot and on horseback, theparty made well over four hundred collec-tions of herbaceous and woody plants in thePark and from nearby parts of Montana."There is no time like the present" to collecta plant, Professor Jack had admonishedMcKelvey on this, her first-ever collectingtrip.

Jack introduced her to the rigors of packingand shipping live plants back to the ArnoldArboretum and-worse yet-of pressing anddrying plant specimens. "Specimens are

placed in manila-labelled-... ," she wrotein her diary, "and then placed between blot-ters on driers. These are strapped between thewooded slats and strapped tight. There isplenty of steam heat at Many Glacier whichhelps in the drying. Mr. J[ack]. suggests stand-ing them sidewise so that the heat can havefreer circulation. The driers are changedmorning & evening which is quite a job!" Afew days later she confided, "Rested in am. ifit can be so called as I pressed & dried speci-mens. Can’t possibly label everything now."

In July of the next year McKelvey and Jackmade a much briefer collecting trip, to theWhite Mountains of New Hampshire. Back in

Susan Delano McKelvey as a young woman. This pho-tograph was taken in New York City before Mrs. Mc-Kelvey came to Boston. It is used through the courtesyof Jon Katherine McKelvey.

Boston, McKelvey worked up both collec-tions and in March 1923, at Sargent’s sugges-tion, shipped nearly two hundred specimensto Alice Eastwood (1859-1953) at the Califor-nia Academy of Sciences, initiating thereby along and friendly association with the re-nowned California botanist. Early in her ca-reer Eastwood had spent three days collectingplants in the Rocky Mountains with AlfredRussel Wallace and in 1914 had collected for

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the Arnold Arboretum in the Yukon. "I oftensee your name on the Arnold Arboretumspecimens," McKelvey wrote to Eastwood,"and wish I were as good a collector as I hearyou are!"

"

Despite this early period of fieldwork,however, McKelvey’s interest had begun tofocus on the Arboretum’s developing lilaccollection, again at the suggestion of Sargent.In the Arboretum’s library, herbarium, andcollection of living plants she found "unusualadvantages for study." It was in Syringa-thelilacs-that she would make her first signifi-cant contribution to botany, a monograph onthe genus Syringa. Nonetheless, she wouldnot forget the collecting techniques she hadlearned in the wilderness of Montana. Theywould come into play again before the decadewas out.

Over the next seven years she would visitlilac collections in the United States, Canada,England, and France, gathering informationfor her book. She would visit numerous plantnurseries and would examine preservedspecimens in herbaria at Kew and Paris, aswell as in the Gray Herbarium of HarvardUniversity, and would borrow specimensfrom Kew, the British Museum, Edinburgh,and Budapest. She would correspond withRenato Pampanini in Florence, Camillo K.Schneider, Cecil E. C. Fischer, and other spe-cialists, as well as with growers in the UnitedStates, France, Germany, Switzerland, theNetherlands, and other countries. She wouldpore over herbals, the early botanical litera-ture, monographs, botanies, floras, and thebotanical and horticultural journals of tencountries, as well as the catalogs of wellknown nurseries in many of those same coun-tries. In 1925 she would describe a new spe-cies of Syringa (Syringa rugulosa). ).The resulting book, The Lilac: A Mono-

graph, appeared in 1928, published byMacmillan. Ernest H. Wilson, "Keeper" ofthe Arnold Arboretum, had written a shortsection for it on the history and distributionof the lilac, and Alfred Rehder had supplied

both a description of the genus and its sec-tions and a taxonomic key, and had helped inmany other ways. By the time The Lilac waspublished, McKelvey would be an authority.

The Lilac was well received. The Journal ofthe Royal Horticultural Society called it a"remarkable volume on the genus Syringa-a unique monograph which will for manyyears constitute a monument to the remark-able research and painstaking industry of anAmerican lady-botanist [sic]." Horticulture,Scientific Monthly, Rhodora, LandscapeArchitecture, the New York Times and Her-ald Tribune, the Times of London, and manyother publications-professional and layalike-lavished praise on it.

In gratitude for Sargent’s unstinting sup-port for the lilac project, McKelvey haddedicated The Lilac to, simply, "The Profes-sor. But Sargent would not know of it, for hehad died on March 22, 1927, in his eighty-sixth year, whereupon Ernest Wilson hadbecome "Keeper" of the Arnold Arboretum.With Sargent’s death and the publication ofher book, McKelvey would make an abruptabout-face:-she would turn her sights to-ward the plants of the American Southwest.

The Road to Freedom: 1928-1936McKelvey in Boston and her brothers Williamand Moreau in New York contributed, gener-ously but behind the scenes, to the CharlesSprague Sargent Memorial Fund, a successfulnationwide campaign to raise one milliondollars for the Arboretum’s endowment in1928. In that year she was appointed toHarvard’s Committee to Visit the ArnoldArboretum, a position she filled for decades.Then, beginning in October of that year, per-haps by way of a vacation, she made the first(and shortest) of eight trips she would make tothe American Southwest over the next eightyears.

In August 1928 she had written to AliceEastwood, asking whether Eastwood wouldbe interested in botanizing for a month inNew Mexico and Arizona. "I would get a car,"

"

14

McKelvey offered, "and pay for your expensesout and back. If you could pay for your roomand food you would not have any other ex-penses ; if you could not afford to do that thenfor the pleasure of having you along I shoulddo that too." "I am very anxious to studyJunipers and Cypresses," McKelvey ex-

plained, "but you could collect of courseanything you wanted; I would like your helpand advice on those two plants especiallythough." Eastwood replied in the affirmative.

Travelling by train, again via Clevelandand Chicago, McKelvey arrived in Lamy,New Mexico, on October 11, where her faith-ful chauffeur-cum-bodyguard, Oscar EdwardHamilton (whom she called simply "Hamil-ton"), met her with the limousine he haddriven to New Mexico from Boston. Big,broad-shouldered, slow-spoken, and perenni-ally good-natured, Hamilton had been born inthe Southwest, perhaps in Arizona or Okla-homa, and he apparently had never been toschool. He spoke with a most pronounceddrawl that must have contrasted dramati-cally with Susan McKelvey’s clipped, north-ern speech. Half an hour after Hamilton ap-peared, Alice Eastwood arrived by train fromCalifornia. The three of them proceeded toSanta Fe and spent the night there.

Next day the botanizing party started forLas Vegas and from there drove to PecosCanyon, Puye, Albuquerque, and other sitesin New Mexico, collecting plants along theway. Hamilton and Eastwood took an imme-diate liking to one another. By November 11,when they arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, SusanMcKelvey had made four hundred ten collec-tions. That very evening she boarded a trainfor Boston, and Eastwood departed for Cali-fornia. Though she had not collected a singleyucca, agave, or cactus on the trip, it was inthese groups-especially yucca-that Mc-Kelvey would someday become an authority.Syringa was behind her now. The plants of thearid Southwest had just laid claim to her life:over the next two decades Yucca would be herprincipal preoccupation, the Southwest her

special province.McKelvey must have been very much

taken by the Southwest, for in December1928 she informed Eastwood that "It looksnow as though I might go out again, probablyto southern Arizona and New Mexico, inJanuary for a trip of about six weeks or twomonths. Miss Edlmann, who is the English-woman I spoke of and Miss Sturtevant’s part-ner in the iris nursery, can go with me. She ismuch interested in plants." She tried to per-suade Eastwood to join them: "Wouldn’t youconsider it enough spring in those parts to j oinus. There would be lots of room in the car andyou would find her very interested and a nicecompanion. Just the kind you would like."But to no avail. "I wish you were joining us-do change your mind & telegraph," McKelveyimplored Eastwood a month later. "Hamiltonis driving us again and I am sure will miss you.He surely will see his house." "

The Lilac was selling exceedingly well. Infact, McKelvey informed Eastwood in Janu-ary that "now they are after me about gettingout an abridged form of my book for popularuse.... Most of the first edition is sold & ofthat there may have to be a reprint beforelong. As no reviews have come out yet every-one seems to think that is surprising-no oneis more astonished than SDMcK!" In 1929McKelvey received the Centennial GoldMedal of the Massachusetts HorticulturalSociety for the book, and the Schaffer Medalof the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society,the first time the medal had been awarded fora book. From the Garden Club of America shereceived the Emily Renwick AchievementMedal.

She already had "decided, under advice, onthe subject of a new book-," she informedEastwood, "on the non-indigenous trees inthe U. S. A. It means seeing the best oldspecimens & getting their history & photo-graphs & will take the rest of my life." Butwhen she returned to Boston after the secondtrip to the Southwest she reported to

Eastwood that "I am a cactus enthusiast

15 s

now-and an Agave one." By July, after athird trip to the Southwest, this time in thecompany of Eastwood, she was contemplat-ing a book "on the common trees ofArizona-including such things as Yucca,Agaves, Cacti, etc.," with Eastwood contrib-uting a section on the herbaceous plants. "Iam much more interested in that subject,"McKelvey confessed.

The second trip had lasted for nearly twomonths (January 16-March 17, 1929). Againtravelling by train, McKelvey and her com-panion, Violet F. Edlmann (died 1963), hadarrived in Tucson on January 19, remaining inArizona until March 16. (Miss Edlmann had"left for East" on February 24.) McKelveymade nearly five hundred collections in justunder two months, among which were agave,yucca, and cactus specimens.

Violet Frederika Edlmann, a well-to-doEnglishwoman, lived in Wellesley Farms,Massachusetts, at the time. An associate ofthe pioneering iris hybridizer Grace Stur-tevant ( 18G5-1947) from 1926 until 1931, sheparticipated in Sturtevant’s iris-hybridizingprogram at Glen Road Iris Gardens in Welles-ley Farms. In 1930 Edlmann accompaniedSturtevant on an iris-collecting trip to Cali-fornia. Then, abruptly, she returned to Eng-land, married Sir Mark Edlmann Collet, 2ndBt., son of a sometime Governor of the Bankof England, and passed the rest of her life onthe Isle of Man as Lady Collet. Though shemaintained membership in the British IrisSociety until her death in 1963, she appears tohave lost interest in hybridizing irises.

McKelvey was back in Arizona again bythe end of April 1929 for her third foray to theSouthwest. In Flagstaff she was met byHamilton, who apparently had remainedbehind at his homestead in the TucsonMountains. He had begun to collect plants onhis own in McKelvey’s absence, as well as tophotograph them. For a few days they botan-ized in the vicinity of Flagstaff, the San Fran-cisco Mountains, Prescott, and points be-tween. On May 5, Alice Eastwood joined

Susan McKelvey, impaled by an aggressive specimen of fAgave palmeri near Fish Creek, Apache Trail, Arizona.This photograph from the Archives of the Arnold Arbo-retum was taken on February 18, 1929, by Violet F.Edlmann.

them at Apache Lodge, and next morningthey took the road to Sunflower Mine in theMazatzal Mountains. McKelvey’s field note-book shows that her interest had indeedturned rapidly to cacti, yuccas, and agaves onthis trip, though she did not neglect otherplants. By the time she left Flagstaff on June 8,she had made more than three hundred col-lections.

In July McKelvey, by now back in Boston,shipped two boxes of clothing to Eastwood, toreplace garments Eastwood had lost in a firethat destroyed her house. "Now I do not wantyou to give them all away to someone

else ;" McKelvey admonished, "unless youdo not like them. I chose them out with careand with you in mind.... You certainly writecheerfully-as you would-about the fire."This act of generosity seems to have beentypical of McKelvey, for she took a sincereinterest in Hamilton’s welfare as well. Shewas sending him to school.

"So far all goes well about Hamilton," shenotified Eastwood in July.

I have started him with a fine teacher-per-haps when he got further along he could go to

16 6

O. E. Hamilton, Susan McKelvey’s chauffeur, beside afif teen-foot-tall Opuntia versicolor in the Rincon Moun-tains of Arizona. Mrs. McKelvey took this photographon March 19, 1930. From the Archives of the ArnoldArboretum.

high school. She says he is working hard butthat his lack is abysmal. She is an olderwoman and seems to have great insight, andlike all who get to know Hamilton she sayshe is a real gentleman and feels there must begood background somewhere. I believe thatthe first thing we know she will like him asmuch as you and I do.

In August, McKelvey wrote a long letter toEastwood. "You sound as though you hadmade lots of headway on your plants-havingarrived at Compositae. All I have done is toget my specimens of Cacti & Agave sorted &

labelled, with the photographs to accompanythem, and sent off to [William] Trelease &

[Nathaniel Lord] Britton.""Hamilton seems to like Boston," she

continued,

and talks as though he was here for life. Hehas not started in on photography, develop-ing etc., but has his hands full with the 3 Rs.He is only in 2°d grade work his teacher saysbut she is much interested in him and he is

making excellent progress. It is really touch-ing to see how hard he works and how seri-ously he takes it all. Do drop him a line if youget a chance for he thinks you have forgottenhim although I assure him to the contrary.That nice Mr. Rehder thanked him so pleas-antly, at my suggestion, for the good collect-ing he had done. I asked Wilson to do so buthe said "not to spoil him"! You can imaginehow mad I felt. I never believe that anyone is

spoiled by encouragement-and am sureHamilton wld not be....

McKelvey’s next journey to the Southwest(November 24, 1929-April 11, 1930) wouldbe far more than a routine botanizing trip.Indeed, it would take her to Nevada, Califor-nia, Arizona, and New Mexico and wouldyield another three hundred specimens, but amore important objective was the divorce shewould obtain in Reno on March 3. SusanMcKelvey had been separated, not divorced,from her husband, Charles, since she leftNew York in 1919. In 1927, their estate inOyster Bay had been sold. Two years laterCharles McKelvey would retire from his lawpractice and move to Vermont and from thereto Sweden, where he would remarry in 1932and-by all accounts- live out his remainingdays in luxury, a member of the international"jet set."

Susan McKelvey was acutely sensitive tothe complications that her state of maritallimbo caused. When a Macmillan trade repre-sentative innocently asked her to "writesomething of yourself as an individual, howyou became interested in writing the book,

17 7

where you have lived, your association withhorticultural interests, etc.," for use in pub-licity about The Lilac, McKelvey flatly re-fused. "I ... fully understand your feelingabout the publicity," the Macmillan repre-sentative replied somewhat gingerly. For

McKelvey the impasse must have been anespecially onerous burden.On September 27, 1929, McKelvey had

confided to Alice Eastwood that "There havebeen lots of family things to keep me thinkingand acting, too, and I am rather worn out. Thelong & short of it seems to be that I shallprobably go to Reno-by November if pos-sible, & be there 3 months. Every other staterequires a long continuous residence beforeaction can even be started and I am not a freeenough agent to get away for a long time." "

On November 4 she wrote Eastwood that"I am leaving for Reno on the 17‘h with mybrother [Moreau] and a lawyer [A. E. Foster]. Itis still uncertain what can be done and will beuntil I get out there.... Hamilton takes thecar out this week."

McKelvey did not leave Boston until No-vember 24. The next day, in Chicago, herbrother and Mr. Foster joined her. The partyreached Reno aboard the Overland Limitedon November 27, and McKelvey set up resi-dence in the Riverside Hotel. That same nightthe two men left.

Hamilton had "left Boston in [the] Lin-coln" on November 22, arriving in Reno onDecember 3. Three days later he and Mc-Kelvey departed for the Sierra Nevada andLake Tahoe, collecting near Portola, Califor-nia. They collected near Susanville, Califor-nia, a few days later and over the next threemonths made many botanical forays in Ne-vada and California, interrupting them in lateFebruary and early March for the divorce pro-ceedings.

Alas, McKelvey’s divorce was not to be theprivate affair she must have fervently hoped itwould be. In December a New York paperwould report that "Society, especially the oldguard of the Washington sq. section, has

learned with much regret that the CharlesWylie McKelveys have reached a parting ofthe ways after almost two decades of maritalbliss [sic]. That the breach has widened tosuch proportions a reconciliation is beyondthe realm of possibility is admitted by thoseclose to the McKelveys." In March, the NewYork papers announced the divorce-"granted on the ground of desertion." "GETSRENO DIVORCE FROM C. W. M’KELVEY," "

the Times announced; "Former Susan DelanoResumes Maiden Name...."On February 9, McKelvey wrote to Alice

Eastwood from Reno, inviting Eastwood tojoin her for some collecting in Arizona "afterI leave here." She reported that, while

Hamilton is well[,] I am afraid his English ishopeless; at all events he does not appear tohear the difference and it often seems kinderto let him go along in happy ignorance thanto keep correcting him. I do not see that thereis much to be gained by so doing. It is ratherpathetic for with a good education and hischaracter and interests he might have gottenfurther. Still he seems to like the job he hasand without flattering myself in any way it iscertainly a better one than he has ever had.

From Nevada McKelvey and Hamiltonproceeded in the Lincoln to Tucson, via King-man and Prescott. On March 14, Eastwoodarrived from California for a few days of col-lecting near Tucson, departing on the twenty-third "to see Mr. Rock" i. e., Joseph F. C.Rock (1884-1962), the plant explorer, whohad just returned to the United States fromtwo years of plant collecting in China. Rockhad landed in San Francisco on the twenty-first.

McKelvey and Hamilton motored to King-man again and from there~ollecting enroute-headed east by way of Holbrook,Arizona ("Commercial & Arizona Hotels!!Drunk men!!"); Albuquerque; Amarillo,Texas; Oklahoma City ("Terrible roads!");Springfield, Missouri; Saint Louis (where

18 8

they visited the Missouri Botanical Garden);and Urbana, Illinois. In Urbana McKelveycalled on Professor William Trelease ( 1857-1945), a professor of botany at the Universityof Illinois who had worked on the agaves andyuccas. From Urbana McKelvey went to

Chicago and boarded a train for Boston.Eastwood visited Boston at some point

during the fall of 193~at just about the timeErnest Wilson (who had succeeded Sargent asthe Arboretum’s director) was killed, alongwith his wife, in an automobile mishap onOctober 15. Early in December, McKelveywrote Eastwood that "I cannot rememberwhether the Wilson accident came before orafter you were here. It was pretty sad busi-ness. The work has been apportioned & goeson well however. [I]t is always a little sad tosee how well things go on in the world with-out any one individual however valuable."

McKelvey was taking courses at the GrayHerbarium at the time. "The lectures areinteresting," she wrote in the same letter, "&we are at the Liliaceae which comes near myheart."

McKelvey had become very fond of theSouthwest by now. The cold and snow of thatNew England December made her long forArizona. But she would have had difficultymoving there. "My brother [probablyMoreau] seems awfully loath to have methink of living in the West," she confided toEastwood. "It rather takes the heart out of apossible purchase out there to have him feelthat way about it." Despite the impossibilityof moving to Arizona, however, McKelveydecided at about this time that she wouldwrite a book on the yuccas of the Southwest.

She was beginning to receive recognitionfor her botanical work and in 1931 was ap-

Susan McKelveyand Hamilton pose before the vehicle that took them to several states in the Southwest in March, April,and May 1932. The trailer on the right holds specimens and equipment. They are shown here at the home of McKelvey’sbrother Moreau Delano in Orange, New Jezsey, which they msited en route to Boston on June I l. This photograph is usedthrough the courtesy of Jon Katherine McKelvey.

19 9

pointed research assistant at the Arnold Ar-boretum, a humble post she would hold formany years. In 1932 Horticulture publishedan article of hers on pine blister rust, and in1932 the Journal of the Arnold Arboretumpublished one on the taxonomic and cytologi-cal relationships of Yucca and Agave that shehad written in collaboration with ProfessorKarl Sax. By 1934 her reputation was growing:John Hendley Barnhart of the New York Bo-tanical Garden wrote to request personal dataabout her for his biographical card catalog ofbotanists, for example. Articles by McKelveyappeared in the National Horticultural jour-nal and the Journal of the Arnold Arboretumin 1934 and 1935. By 1936, when an article ofhers on the Arboretum was published in theHarvard Alumni Bulletin, she had become astaunch partisan of the institution that hadhelped her to rebuild her life.

From 1928 to 1936 Susan McKelvey wouldmake eight trips to the Southwest (Arizona,Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado,Texas, Oklahoma, and California). Five

trips-those of April to June 1929, December1929 to April 1930, April to June 1931, Marchto May 1932, and April to June 1934-hadbeen for the sole purpose of studying Yuccaand allied genera. Hamilton "made a trip tosecure important material" in the summer of1935, and in late November 1935 throughMarch 1936 McKelvey and her brotherMoreau, by now an invalid, spent the winternear Indio, California. "I only got into thefield when (rare) conditions made it pos-sible," McKelvey recorded of this trip, how-ever. During those years she collected thou-sands of specimens of Yucca, pressing themor preserving them in alcohol. The ever faith-ful Hamilton took thousands of high-qualityphotographs of the plants and landscapes ofthe Southwest (they are now in the Photogra-phy Archives of the Arnold Arboretum), aswell as participating in the collecting anddoing the necessary "heavy work." "

The trips went smoothly for the most part,although one (that of April to June 1934)

began most inauspiciously. On the evening ofApril 3, Hamilton, driving alone from Bostonto New Mexico as usual, was held up androbbed by two bandits in El Reno, Oklahoma.Brandishing a machine gun, they forced himoff the road and took his watch, seventy-fivedollars in cash, and nine bags of luggage con-taining most of his and McKelvey’s clothes.Fortunately, they spared the microscopes andother equipment.

In December 1936 Moreau Delano died inBoston, leaving McKelvey free to devote fulltime to her book on the yuccas. She workedon it through most of 1937, and by mid-1938 8the first volume (Yuccas of the SouthwesternUnited States Part One) came off the pressunder the Arboretum’s imprint. She was glad,"very glad," when Alice Eastwood-then inher eightieth year-gave it her stamp of ap-proval. McKelvey launched immediately intoPart Two, but its publication would be nineyears in coming. "I am indeed fortunate inhaving an interest," McKelvey commentedto Eastwood, "and have clung to that throughthick & thin. So many of my friends seem lostwithout one."The Great Depression was in full sway at

the time, and McKelvey’s cousin Franklinwas President. "You evidently do not caremuch for the New Deal!" she wrote East-wood, "& wld be in the midst of Sympathisersin this section of the country. I sometimeswonder whether conservatives are wrong-whether F. D. R. may not go down in historyas a saver of democracy? In the midst of thingsperspective is impossible."

A Second Book, a Second War: 1938-1945Over the next few years of economic depres-sion and war McKelvey continued her yuccaproject. At some point she transferred heractivities from the Arboretum in JamaicaPlain to the Botanical Museum in Cambridgeand through her contacts in the Southwestwas able to obtain some fine specimens ofIndian corn for the Museum’s director, Pro-fessor Paul C. Mangelsdorf. By the spring of

20

Mr. Weeks Asks Himself to TeaWhen Edward Weeks, who for many years was editor of The Atlantic Monthly, was serving on the Boardof Overseers of Harvard University, he encountered Susan Delano McKelvey during the painful anddivisive episode called "the Arnold Arboretum controversy." The following excerpt from his bookWriters and Friends (Little, Brown, 1981) demonstrates the strength of McKelvey’s commitment to theinstitution that had played such an important role m her life, as well as her commitment to its founder,Charles Sprague Sargent. The excerpt is printed here through the courtesy of Mr. Weeks.

Each member of the Board is assignedto "oversee" one or more depart-ments of the University and to file anannual report on their condition. Inaddition he serves as chairman of aVisiting Committee, composed ofeminent authorities, not necessanlywith Harvard affiliations, who surveya department from the outside, andwho meet in Boston and Cambridgeat least once a year to concert theirfindings. My first and most difficultassignment was the Arnold Arbore-tum, an enclosure of trees and flower-ing shrubs in Jamaica Plain of whichby deed of trust the University wasthe caretaker. If Harvard was foundnegligent, the Arboretum would re-vert to the City of Boston.Charles Sprague Sargent had been

director of the Arboretum for fifty-four years, and it was he who made itinternationally known: the park grewfrom 125 to 265 acres less manicuredbut not much less renowned thanKew Gardens; a modern herbariumwas built and a most valuable libraryof nearly 50,000 volumes and 22,000photographs made it a center for re-search. On Sargent’s death in 1927 a amemorial fund of a million dollarshad been added to its endowment.Then came the Depression, two de-structive hurricanes, and the short-age of manpower throughout the war,leaving an urgent need for restora-tion. The time had come when it wasnecessary to renovate some of the oldcollections and to initiate new,extensive plantings.

I did not appreciate this nor did I ap-preciate the rivalry for funds betweenthe botanists in the Arboretum andthe biologists in Cambridge. During[University president James Bryant]Conant’s absence two distinguishedbiologists, Drs. Irving W. Bailey andPaul Mangelsdorf, had compiled a re-

port which the president on his re-turn recommended to the Overseers,saying that "for once I find the biolo-gists in complete agreement." Itseemed to me that its main plea wasfor a new buildmg in Cambridge, andwith the others I voted for its adop-tion.The Visiting Committee of the Ar-

boretum was composed of twenty-two members, including Henry F.du Pont, Childs Frick, John Ames,Godfrey Cabot, Mrs. Grenville Clark,Mrs. George Agassiz, Mrs. FrankCrowninshield, Mrs. Delano Mc-

Kelvey, some wealthy, each expert inhorticulture. I do not have a greenthumb, and while I worship trees, Iknew I was out of my depth at theluncheon I arranged for the group atthe Harvard Club of Boston. But I didnot anticipate their united cold front.The following week I called up Mrs.McKelvey and invited myself to tea.I knew she liked fly fishing, and aftera few words about Kennebago [thearea of northwestern Maine whereMcKelvey was spending her sum-mers] I took the plunge."What went wrong at our lunch-

eon ? Why were you all so set againstme?" I asked."There was nothmg personal," she

replied. "But you must have read theBailey-Mangelsdorf Report. Don’t

you realize what it threatens to do tothe Arboretum? Many of us on theCommittee helped to raise the fundin memory of Charles Sargent. Now,apparently with the president’s ap-proval, we’re told that Harvard pro-poses to break up Sargent’s pricelesslibrary and to spend the money wegave, not to revive the Arboretum butfor a new building in Cambridge. It’soutrageous!"

"

As I questioned other members ofthe Visiting Committee, I was con-

vinced that this was a tempest largerthan a teapot. I warned my classmate,Keith Kane, who was a member of theCorporation and the president’s as-sistant in public relations, that thesepeople were really up in arms. Gren-ville Clark, also on the Corporation,at his wife’s persuasion, had changedhis vote; so did I in my report to theOverseers, and Conant dubbed us"two-vote men." But the attitudewhich prevailed was, in the words ofone cynic on the Corporation, "Whyshouldn’t we skm that fat cat?" TheVisiting Committee engaged two ca-pable lawyers, Mike Farley andRobert C. Dodge, to resist the Report,and the conflict dragged on for years.The University finally compromised:Sargent’s library was left intact andthe memorial part of the Arboretum ~,endowment was not spent on bricks

’Iand mortar.I recall this episode not because I

like to criticize my alma mater, towhom I owe so much. Had Conantnot been distracted by the war hisprudence might have restrained thebiologists. At the time I speak of, theUniversity had already divested itselfof two "outlying provinces" forwhich there were no longer sufficientacademic interest or funds-theBussey Institute had been closed andthe Gray Herbarium gone to seed. Intoday’s pinching economy other en-dowed institutions will have to di-vest themselves of provinces they canno longer afford, and will do so, I

hope, without infuriating donorswhose intent deserves respect.The remainder of my term was

more peaceful.... ’

-Excetpted from Wnters and Friends, byEdward Weeks (Boston: Little, Brownand Company, 1981J, pages 140 and 141.Copynght ® 1981 by Edward Weeks.Used with the permission of EdwardWeeks.

21

1943 her manuscript was ready for publica-tion, but funding was unavailable at theArboretum because of the war, and so she putthe manuscript aside, saw to it that all loanspecimens were returned to their owners, andwaited for war’s end. In any event, she wasforced to vacate the space in the BotanicalMuseum by the Navy in mid-1943.

"At the moment I am working at home, ona quite different subject... ," she confided toMangelsdorf in March 1944. "I’ve no ideawhen, if ever, my yucca paper will be pub-lished-it was handed in last spring-and totell you the truth (except that I like to com-plete something that is begun) I’m enjoyingmy present subject much more." She hadbegun work on her third and last book, apainstaking account of botanical explorationin that part of the United States lying west ofthe Mississippi River. "Now I have begun onsomething else and am t_~riiled about it," sheinformed Alice Eastwood. "In fact so inter-ested that I wish I had begun years ago." "

Hamilton was a staff sergeant in the Armyby this time, connected with a medical unit inFrance. "He hope[s] to do X-ray work," Mc-Kelvey informed Eastwood, "but whether hedoes that now or other things I do not know;he is not a person who can express himself inwriting very well and his letters tell next tonothing. He did write last that the mud re-minded him of a day in Arizona when themud was so bad that it removed one of myshoes." "

Crowning Achievement, Crowning Irony:1945-1956The enterprise on which McKelvey hadembarked in 1944 would materialize in thepublication in 1956 of her third and finalbook, the classic Botanical Exploration of theTrans-Mississippi West 1790-1850. It wouldbe a natural outgrowth of her years of work inthe American Southwest on the genus Yucca.McKelvey was done with the massive (1,853-page) manuscript by late 1951 or early 1952, atwhich time she submitted it to Harvard

University Press for publication (the ArnoldArboretum was to underwrite its publicationcosts). The Press rejected it, however, and shesought help and advice from Professor KarlSax, the Arboretum’s director, and fromWalter Muir Whitehill, librarian of the Bos-ton Athenxum. Whitehill put her in touchwith Frederick W. Anthoensen, owner of theAnthoensen Press in Portland, Maine, whoagreed to publish the book. On Whitehill’srecommendation she secured the services ofHarvard Professor Erwin Raisz, a skilled car-tographer who created exquisitely calligra-phed maps to accompany her text. Eventu-ally, Professor Richard A. Howard, Sax’s suc-cessor as director of the Arnold Arboretum,assisted McKelvey during the final stages ofpublication and in publicizing the book.Though dated 1955 on its title page, the beau-tifully printed book actually was not issueduntil March 1956.

It received excellent reviews. In Rhodora,Joseph Ewan of Tulane University, an author-ity on the history of botany, dubbed it "thisbook-of-a-century." "Only one book of itskind is expected in a century," he wroteelsewhere. For it and her other botanical andhorticultural writings McKelvey received agold medal from the Massachusetts Horticul-tural Society and the Sara Gildersleeve FifeMemorial Award from the New York Botani-cal Garden.The years were years of controversy as

well. It was during this period that the ArnoldArboretum controversy occurred. McKelvey,who owed much to Charles Sprague Sargentand the Arnold Arboretum and who had beena member of Harvard’s Committee to Visitthe Arnold Arboretum since 1928, played aleading role in opposing the Bailey Plan(1945), which would divert Arboretum fundsto uses that she considered to be inconsistentwith the purposes for which the funds origi-nally had been given. The facts of the contro-versy are far too complicated-indeed, far toocontroversial-to be rehearsed here; what isimportant in the present context, perhaps, are

22

McKelvey’s reasons for taking the positionshe did. In her own words, written in 1949,she stated that

Because of my long association with the Ar-nold Arboretum, because of my loyalty toand admiration for its purposes as they wereexpressed and executed by Professor Sargent,and because of my small part (on the BostonCommittee) and the far larger part of mybrother [Moreau] (on the New York

Committee) in helping to raise the SargentMemorial Fund, I am concerned to see thatthe interests of the Arboretum and the intentof the contributors to the Memorial Fund-are protected in the contemplated move toCambridge.

Edward Weeks, former editor of TheAtlan-tic Monthly, was a member of the Arbore-tum’s Visiting Committee when the contro-versy erupted. Recently, in his book Writersand Friends, he describes his involvement inthe controversy. With his permission wereprint on page 20 Mr. Weeks’s account of avisit he paid to the home of the redoubtableMrs. McKelvey.

The Final Years: 1956-1964With the publication of her third and lastbook in 1956, McKelvey, now seventy-threeyears of age, immediately began drafting herwill. The first step was to make an inventoryof her botanical legacy of books, letters, rec-ords, photographs, and preserved specimens,some of which were in her home, some ofwhich were in the Botanical Museum inCambridge. The Museum’s director, Profes-sor Paul C. Mangelsdorf, considered her col-lection of yuccas and related plants to be "themost extensive collection of its kind evermade and [to be] quite valuable." Her firstthought was to leave the materials to theMuseum, but after consultation with variousfaculty and staff members of both the Botani-cal Museum and the Arnold Arboretum-who agreed that the materials indeed werevaluable and urged that they remain together,

but considered them to be more valuable inplant taxonomy than in economic botany-she stipulated in her will (dated July 5, 1960)that all of her "books, pamphlets, notes, rec-ords, photographs, and photographic films,and miscellaneous articles in the field ofbotany" be given to the Arnold Arboretumupon her death. She did not forget Whitehill’sAthenasum in her will, or Oscar EdwardHamilton-"formerly in my employ, whosepresent address is Blairsden, California." "

In June of 1964, Professor Richard A.Howard, the Arboretum’s director, receivedfrom Mrs. McKelvey a letter requesting herretirement from the Committee to Visit theArnold Arboretum, on which she had servedsince 1928, and from her appointment as Re-search Associate, which she had held since1931. McKelvey explained that she could nolonger do the things she used to do andwanted to make way for someone more activein both of the roles she cherished. A monthlater, at the advanced age of eighty-one, shedied at Phillips House in Boston.Few individuals have been affiliated with

the Arnold Arboretum as long as Susan Mc-Kelvey was, and few have done as much for it,in so many ways, as she did. If she was itsbenefactor and champion, however, it washer godsend. The Arnold Arboretum hasnever meant as much to anyone else-in somany ways-as it meant to Susan AdamsDelano McKelvey, nee Susan Magoun De-lano. In redeeming her life it became her life.

A Bibliography of Susan Delano McKelveySyringa rugulosa, a new species from western China.

Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, Volume 6,Number 3 (July 1925), pages 153 and 154.

A new hybrid lilac. Horticulture, Volume 5, Number 15(August 1, 1927), page 302.

The Lilac: A Monograph. New York: Macmillan Com-pany, 1928. xvi + 581 pages.

A white pine blister rust demonstraton. Horticulture,Volume 10, Number 18 (September 15, 1932),page 331.

Taxonomic and cytological relationships of Yucca andAgave. Journal of the Arnold Arboretum,Volume 14, Number 1 (January 1933), pages 76

23

to 81. (Written with Professor Karl Sax.) (Arctomecon californicum. National Horticultural

Magazine, Volume 13, Number 4 (October1934), pages 349 and 350.

A verification of the occurrence of Yucca Whipplei mArizona. Journal of the Arnold Arboretum,Volume 15, Number 4 (Octoberl934), pages350 to 352.

Notes on Yucca. Journal of the Arnold Arboretum,Volume 16, Number 2 (April 1935), pages 268to 271.

The Arnold Arboretum. Harvard Alumni Bulletin,Volume 38, Number 15 (January 17, 1936),pages 464 to 472.

Yuccas of the Southwestern United States. Part One.Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts: Arnold Arbore-tum, 1938. 150 pages.

Yuccas of the Southwestern United States. Part Two.Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts: Arnold Arbore-tum, 1947. 192 pages.

A new Agave from Arizona. Journal of the ArnoldArboretum, Volume 30, Number3 (July 1949),pages 227 to 230.

Botanical Exploration of the Trans-Mississippi West,1790-1850. Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts:Arnold Arboretum, 1955 [1956]. xl + 1144

pages.A discussion of the Pacific Railroad report as issued in

the quarto edition. Journal of the Arnold Ar-boretum, Volume 40, Number 1 (January1959), pages 38 to 67.

A Note on SourcesSusan Delano McKelvey’s life has been reconstructedfrom manuscript and published sources in the Archivesof the Arnold Arboretum, the Harvard University Ar-chives, the Suffolk County [Massachusetts] Court-

house, Bryn Mawr College, the Hunt Institute for Bo-tanical Documentation of Camegie-Mellon University,the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the New YorkBotanical Garden, the California Academy of Sciences,the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and the

Massachusetts Historical Society. Articles in the NewYork Times and clippings from other, unidentified NewYork newspapers supplied some details, as did RichardA. Howard’s reminiscence of Mrs. McKelvey in theJournal of the Arnold Arboretum (Volume 46, Number1 [January 1965J, pages 45~7~. An mterview with AlfredJ. Fordham yielded valuable details about Mrs. Mc-Kelvey and O. E. Hamilton. The National Academy ofDesign kindly supphed a photographic print of DunbarBeck’s portrait of Wilham Adams Delano. Among thematerials in the Archives of the Arnold Arboretum thatwere used are McKelvey’s field notebooks, photographs,photographic logs, correspondence, manuscripts, andmaps. Her preserved plant specimens are in the Arbore-tum’s herbarium.

AcknowledgmentsSheila Connor, Carin B. Dohlman, Alfred J. Fordham,Richard A. Howard, Jon Perry, and Stephen A. Spongbergof the Arnold Arboretum supplied much valuable mfor-mation and advice. John M. Woolsey, Jr., Esq., of Bostonprovided both personal reminiscences of Mrs. McKelveyand biographical notices of William Adams Delano,Moreau Delano, and Charles Wylie McKelvey. Jon Kath-erine McKelvey of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, supplied fourphotographs and a personal reminiscence of Susan

McKelvey. Bruce Bartholomew of the California Acad-emy of Sciences photocopied-without complaint-more than two dozen letters from the correspondence ofAlice Eastwood and granted permission to quote fromthem. Susan Fraser of the New York Botanical Garden,Catherine S. Craven of the Massachusetts Historical

Society, Anita L. Karg of the Hunt Institute for BotanicalDocumentation, and Teresa R. Taylor of Bryn MawrCollege responded to mquiries about materials held bytheir institutions. Freek Vrugtman of the Royal Botani-cal Gardens, Hamilton, Ontario, forwarded copies ofseveral items relating to Mrs. McKelvey in the Gardens’slibrary. David Walsh Markstem of the National Acad-emy of Design, New York, expedited a request for a copyof Dunbar Beck’s portrait of William Adams Delano.Edward Weeks, on exceedingly short notice, willinglyand graciously permitted use of material on Mrs. Mc-Kelvey from his book Writers and Friends. My sincerethanks to each and every one of them!

Kirk Boott and the Greening of Boston, 1783-1845

Alan Emmet

Despite travail, despite tragedy, Kirk Boott and his family contributed much tothe early years of horticulture and botany in the metropolis of New England

A love for growing plants seemed to run in theBoott family. Kirk Boott (1755-1817), his fa-ther before him, and his several sons afterhim, had a passion for plants, expressed eitherthrough horticulture or botany. In theirwidely differing lives, lives which includedimportant accomplishments as well as bleaktragedy, this was one linking strand.Members of the Boott family shared an-

other bias. Even those whose earliest yearswere spent in Boston felt a strong cultural andfamilial bond with England, the land fromwhich their parents had come. Indeed, twosons, when grown, moved permanently toEngland.

In the middle of the Eighteenth Century,one Francis Boott owned and operated a mar-ket garden in the town of Derby in the EnglishMidlands. For about twenty-five years-thewhole of his adult life-he and his wife andtheir children worked together on this sharedenterprise. Francis’s sons worked with himon a couple of acres at the edge of town, wherethey raised vegetables and young hawthornplants for hedges. One son, Kirk, recalledrising early to bunch radishes (three bunchesfor a penny) and bouncing along in the cab-bage cart behind "Old Jack," their horse.lThey took the vegetables to be sold by Mrs.Boott and her daughters from a shop at thefront of the family’s house. The shop pros-pered and earned for the Bootts the respect ofthe denizens of Derby, even those "far higherin station and fortune."2

Francis lived only to the age of forty-four.After he died in 1776, his five sons scatteredto seek their fortunes elsewhere. Their wid-owed mother and two sisters remained in thenarrow little house in Derby, dependentthereafter on the young men to send moneyhome.One of Francis’s sons found a position as

gardener on an estate, where he had three menunder him.3 The second son, Kirk, left homefor London in 1783, when he was twenty-seven. He found work as a porter in a ware-house but aimed higher. To improve hisimage and his chances, he went to a

fashionable friseur for a powdered wig.4 Tohis sister he wrote, "[F]rom small beginningsI shall rise to be a Merchant, and traverse theOcean to distant shores, with the merchan-dise of Britain, and at last come [home] toDerby...."5 Within five months of leavinghome, Kirk had arranged for passage aboardthe Rosamond to Boston.

Kirk found people to back his venture.Friends paid for his trans-Atlantic passageand furnished him with goods so that he couldopen a shop when he arrived, gambling on hissuccess to recoup their investments. Thediverse shop merchandise that Kirk took withhim included hats, nails, and barrels of gardenseeds.When he landed in June 1783, Kirk Boott

found Boston so green and beautiful that helamented England’s so recent loss of thiscountry. His first letter home sounds like a

25

market gardener’s son writing:Peas have been in a week or more and nowsold at 4/6 sterling per peck. I took a walk inthe garden belonging to my Lodging House,and saw Kidney Beans one foot high and cu-cumbers more than that long. They are for-warder than with us. I have made some

enquiry after gardening, but can get veryundifferent accounts. The gardeners are

slovens and idle.6

His initial optimism waned quickly. TheAmerican economy was in a shambles afterthe Revolutionary War, and Boott’s businesswent very badly at first. His merchandiseseemed all wrong. He wrote his sister that herued the day he had forsaken the simple life ofa market gardener in Derby. In time, how-

The Boott house in Derby, England, with the greengro-cer shop at the front. (The spots are in the original.)Courtesy of Bradley R. Parker.

ever, his straightforward business ethic-tosell better goods at lower prices than his com-petitors~nabled him to become estab-lished. He repaid his debts, began sendingmoney home, and was soon well on the wayto success and prosperity.

Boott soon threw away his powdered pig-~ tail in order to become more American in ap-pearance. American women, however, heldlittle appeal for him. But no matter. He soonlost his heart to another newly arrived Eng-lish emigree, Mary Love, whose father wascaptain of the ship that had brought Boott toBoston. They were married in 1785.

Kirk Boott was an urban man. Although hisyouth had been spent working the soil, hisboyhood home and his family’s existence hadcentered on selling produce in the center oftown. When he came to the United States, thetown life of a merchant was Boott’s goal. Anearly foray into the hinterland, as far as south-ern New Hampshire, persuaded him thatrural New England was rocky, denselywooded, and far less beautiful than Old Eng-land. When he was financially able to build afine house for his family, a site in town nearhis place of business was his obvious choice.

During Kirk Boott’s lifetime American cit-ies began the increase in density and in areathat so changed this country. Kirk’s attach-ment to urban life was tempered by ambiva-lence. He apparently believed that regular es-cape from the city was necessary for one’sphysical and mental well-being. He boughthimself a horse and rode a few miles into thecountry every morning before seven. Repeat-edly, he expressed the regret that he had notexplored "the grand, bold, and picturesquescenery with which this country abounds,"but somehow he was always too busy totravel, except in winter, when it was too cold,or in summer, when it was too hot.’

In 1795, Kirk wrote his sister that "Mr.Theodore Lyman, a worthy friend of ours, haslately bought a Farm. He seems to take muchpleasure in it."8 Boott had collaborated withLyman in such mercantile adventures as

26

sending a ship to the Pacific Northwest inquest of furs. The Lyman estate, "The Vale,"

"

in Waltham, not far from Boston, was one ofthe first places in Boston to be laid out in theinformal English landscape style, followingthe precepts of designer Humphry Repton.Theodore Lyman had greenhouses and a highbrick wall to hasten the ripening of thepeaches espaliered against it. Kirk Boott,perambulating Lyman’s acres, may havewondered briefly whether he, too, shouldestablish his family in a country seat.When yellow fever struck Boston in 1798,

all who could fled the city. The sparselysettled countryside was generally viewed as ahealthier environment than the city. Lymanurged Boott to escape from the unwholesomecity, even offering to provide a house for thefamily, and to send a team of oxen to bring

them to Waltham. Boott turned downLyman’s offer, but after listening day andnight to the sound of hammer and saw at anearby coffinmaker’s shop, he closed his storeand left Boston-by then nearly a ghosttown-until the epidemic had waned. TheBootts rented quarters in outlying Water-town, Theodore Lyman generously supplyingthem with produce and cider.9

A Mansion and a GardenBy 1802 Kirk Boott was at the height of hisprosperity. Neither he nor anyone else fore-saw the trade embargo that would punishAmerican business so severely a few yearslater. Confident of his continuing financialsuccess, Kirk decided to build a townhouse forhimself and his family. His wife worriedabout the expense, but Kirk thanked God that

The rear of the Boott mansion, Bowdoin Square, Boston, showing the lean-to greenhouse, with hotbeds below it, andtrellises for plants along the brick walls of the house. This engraving was made between 1840 and 1847 by an unknownartist. Courtesy of the Boston Athenxum.

27

he was "enabled to provide liberally for [hisfamily’s] wants."loThe half-acre site of Boott’s brick house

was a pasture in Boston’s West End, an areawhich was just then beginning to be devel-oped.ll Charles Bulfinch, Boston’s leadingarchitect, may have been the designer ofBoott’s three-story Federal mansion, with itstall, Palladian windows lighting the stair-case.12 Kirk’s oldest son, Wright, just homefrom school in England, described the newhouse in 1805 as "larger than I expected, andas much handsomer. The doors on the firstfloor are all Mahogany and so highly polishedas to make the furniture look ordinary."’3Soon, according to Wright, his father wasbuying new mahogany furniture, Turkishcarpets, and a stock of wine.

Kirk Boott joined other fashionable Bosto-nians in having Gilbert Stuart paint his por-trait. Boott and his family mingled sociallywith Boston’s leading families. GardinerGreene’s nearby townhouse, set amidstelaborate terraced gardens, was one to whichthe Bootts were often invited. Mr. and Mrs.Boott reciprocated with a cotillion in theirown gleaming mansion.

Attached to Kirk Boott’s new house wasone feature that may have meant more to himthan any other: a greenhouse. Having beenraised as a gardener, one aspect of English lifethat Boott missed particularly was the longgrowing season. As he wrote in 1804, "fromthe severity of the winter, no garden seedscould be put into the ground before April."14Inside his own greenhouse, Boott could feelthat he had defeated winter.

Boott had had a garden almost ever since hefirst landed in Boston. Each year he raised allthe vegetables his family could eat, and somefor the neighbors. He once boasted that "Ihave not had occasion to buy a cucumber oronion this year, and Mary has had a fine showof annual flowers, Balsam, China Asters,etc...."’S He had his sister send him somegooseberry bushes, a fruit he missed. Theywere not a success. He also had her send vege-

table seeds from England, specifying suchfavorites as "the best green, purple, and whiteBrocolli."’s

His new greenhouse flourished during itsfirst season. In December 1805, he wrote thathe had "Roses, Jassamines, Geraniums, andstocks in blow [bloom]," and that bulbs sentto him by an English gardening friend were al-ready "shooting above the earth."1’ Boottknew nonetheless that

ere January shall be passed Jack Frost willgive us trouble eno’ to resist. If this boldintruder can be kept out, I promise myselfmuch pleasure [in the greenhouse] during... Feb’y, March, and April, at which timewe have but little vegetation. I have takengreat pains to keep Lettuce alive thro’ thewinter....

By April, sure enough, "Winter yet bearssway," he wrote, but happily,

my Greenhouse has flourished beyond myexpectation, and what pleases me much, Ihave found my skill equal to the care of it.Lettuces in abundance I have preserved, andhave had fine Sallads thro’ the Winter. Yes-terday I gathered about a Bushel and gave itto my friends.18

Lettuce was equal in importance to flowersin Kirk Boott’s greenhouse; he knew hisfamily’s health depended on it.

Boott kept a cow on his small lot of land,but every remaining square foot was used forhis garden. His 1809 description reveals asmuch about the gardener as the garden:

Our chief pleasure is in our family, andamong our flowering plants. Flora hasdecked our parlour windows for four monthspast in the most gay and beautiful manner.She is now about transferring her beauties tothe open garden. I have more than onehundred Rosetrees of the best kinds justbursting into bloom, from the moss down tothe Scotch Mountain-the cluster Monthlyred, the Cabbage province, pompon DeMeaux, Burgundy, Blandford, Violet, Whitemusk, etc., etc.From the first dawn of vegetation I have a

28

succession of flowers, the modest snowdrop,the golden Crocus, Daffodils, Narcissus,Hyacinths, Cowslips, Tulips etc. Thosefrom Derby never blow but with the mostpleasing association of ideas. The commonweeds of my garden are the greenhouse Gera-niums, Balsams, Coxcombs, Botany-BayXeranthemums, Mignonette, etc. and yet acommon observer would think there washardly anything worth looking at.The Hawthorne-the White Hawthorne is

now in full bloom. 19

Boott had his oldest son write to gardeningfriends in Derby for more English flowers,London Pride and "Bird’s Eye" [?], since"there are none in the country hereabouts.Daisies are such a rarity that they are kept ingreenhouses, as well as Cowslips."2° Even totheir taste in wildflowers, the Bootts were an-glophiles.One son, Francis, reminisced years later on

his father’s devotion to gardening:

He was often in his Garden and about hisframes by four o’clock, and I love to believethat my fondness for plants was caught fromhim.... [His garden] had no ostentationabout it, and the familiar "weeds" ... werehis delight. His roses, stocks, Persian Iris,and Lily of the Valley were the pride of hisGarden, as the Heath and Geraniums were ofhis greenhouse. His salads and cucumberswere the height of his pride as a vegetablegrower....21

These accounts are all that is known ofKirk Boott’s garden. But a hundred "Rose-trees" ! They must have occupied most of thegarden, with spring bulbs and annuals tuckedin around them. The annuals Boott grew hadbeen introduced into America before or soonafter the Revolution. All appear on the plantlists of such noted American gardeners asGeorge Washington and Thomas Jefferson.They, too, grew lavateras, or tree mallows,and everlastings (xeranthemums and cox-combs), which hold their color when dried.22As for Boott’s roses, most were many- petalledcentifolias and damasks, or small-flowered

varieties such as the fragrant Scotch (Rosaspinosissima). The pompon rose ’deMeaux’-a small, pink cabbage rose paintedby Redoute-was probably one of Boott’snewest varieties, having made its first Eng-lish appearance at Kew Gardens in 1789.

Boott’s greenhouse skills are apparentfrom his successes: bulbs forced into midwin-ter bloom, and roses in December. ThePalma-Christi he mentioned was the tropicalcastor-bean tree, Ricinus communis, grownfor its foliage. Greenhouse geraniums-actu-ally, pelargoniums-were imported fromsouthern Africa after 1750.The greenhouse itself was a long lean-to,

its roof only partially glazed. Heat was sup-plied by a wood fire, the smoke of which wasconducted through a horizontal brick fluepast the growing benches, to a chimney at thefar end. Theodore Lyman’s first greenhouse,one of the oldest survivors in this country and

probably built not long before Boott’s, canstill be examined at The Vale in suburbanWaltham, Massachusetts. Boott was doubt-less inspired by Lyman’s example. GardinerGreene, a friend and neighbor of Boott’s, hadwhat may have been the first greenhouse inBoston. Kirk Boott had also seen glasshousesin England in his youth. While helping hisbrother find horticultural employment in1783, Kirk has written that "amongst profes-sional gardeners no place is esteemed a goodone without Hot House and Green House. "23

The technology of horticulture was furtheradvanced in England than in the UnitedStates, but by 1800 greenhouses were notuncommon appurtenances on the estates ofprosperous New England gentlemen.

Bernard M’Mahon published the first edi-tion of The American Gardener’s Calendarin 1806. He explained the differences in con-struction and in use between a greenhouseand a hothouse. The former has only enoughartificial heat to "keep off frost and dispeldamps," while the latter has an inside stoveand more glass.24 The flowers that Boott grewwould suggest that his was actually a hot-

29

The earliest greenhouse at "The Vale," Theodore Ly-man’s estate in Waltham, Massachusetts, probablydat-ing from 1804. This photograph shows the firebox andthe horizontal flue for heating. Kirk Boott’s greenhouseprobably was quite similar. Courtesy of The Society forthe Preservation of New England Antiqmties.

house. Always a little homesick for England,loathing the long New England winters, Boottcreated his own artificial climate.

Kirk Boott and his wife made their long-delayed American sightseeing trip in 1812.They were particularly enthralled by thescenery of the Hudson River valley. The fieldsof wild buttercups observed from the boatreminded Kirk of "the dear and delightfulmeadows of England," the highest praise hecould bestow.2s

Kirk died in 1817. He left his wife, whosurvived him by forty years, four daughters,and five sons.

The Sons of Kirk BoottKirk Boott and his wife set a family patternwhen they enrolled their two oldest sons in

English schools in 1799. When he returned toBoston in 1805, Wright, the oldest, distressedhis father by refusing to go to college. Kirk, Jr.,and his next-younger brother, Francis, didattend Harvard, which their father consid-ered the best place for them to receive anAmerican education. Neither one was happythere. Francis graduated in 1810, but Kirk, Jr.,left without a degree. All three brothers tooka turn helping in the family store, but onlyWright stayed on to become a partner.

Wright Boott developed an enthusiasm forexploring New England and beyond. In 1806,when he was seventeen, he journeyed bycarriage into New Hampshire and Vermont,jolting over log roads, through mud, rocks,snow, and unending forests. "God deliver mefrom such a country," he wrote.26 But twoyears later he and a cousin set off on a longertrip, to Niagara Falls, Montreal, and Quebec.

Wright’s travels developed a focus after hisbrother Francis returned to Boston in 1814.After four years of study in England, Francishad devoted himself to science, particularlybotany. Back in Boston, he became interestedin collecting New England plants. Dr. JacobBigelow, a young professor of medicine atHarvard, shared his interests. Botany andmedicine were viewed as closely related sci-ences. Bigelow asked Francis Boott to helphim prepare a comprehensive work on theflora of New England.2’ To that end, Bigelow,Francis Boott, and three others explored andcollected plants in the mountains of Massa-chusetts and New Hampshire in the summerof 1816. On the summit of Mount Washing-ton, the men left their names in a bottle.Their names have been more permanentlytagged to certain topographic features of themountain-Boott Spur and Bigelow’s Lawn.Francis brought his brother Wright to MountWashington the following month, andWright himself returned on several botanicaland birding expeditions. In 1829, Wright dis-covered an unknown alpine plant that waslater named for him: Prenanthes boottii, rat-tlesnake root.28

30

Francis Boott returned to England in 1820,remaining there for the rest of his life. Hestudied medicine, earning his M.D. at Ed-inburgh in 1825, and practiced in London. In1819, he was made a Fellow of the LinneanSociety of London. Later, he served as Secre-tary of the Society, where his portrait nowhangs. In 1858, he published the first of fourparts of a major botanical work on sedges-the genus Carex-for which he is still known.Harvard honored Francis Boott in 1834 by of-fering him the Professorship of Natural His-tory, but Boott felt he could not accept, sincehe knew only botany, and not other, relateddisciplines such as horticulture and zool-ogy 29 Francis Boott gave his herbarium ofWhite Mountain plants to Sir WilliamJackson Hooker, the Director of the RoyalBotanic Gardens at Kew. Hooker named agoldenrod after Francis Boott, whose name isattached to a sedge, and to an Asiatic waterplant, Boottia cordata.

Having introduced Wright to botanical ex-ploration and study, Francis went on to in-spire their younger brothers James and Wil-liam to follow suit. William studied medicinein Paris and Dublin and gained a reputation asa botanist himself. After Francis died, Wil-liam continued to work on sedges. Boott’sshield fern, Dryopteris boottii, was named forWilliam.

Of the five brothers, only Kirk, Jr., hadlittle active interest in plants. Instead, hedevoted his life to another form of growth,that of the Industrial Revolution in America.As agent and treasurer of a newly formed tex-tile corporation, Merrimack ManufacturingCompany, he acted as organizer, overseer,and resident autocrat during the building ofthe mills, the canals, the housing, and theentire urban fabric of Lowell, Massachusetts,this country’s first planned industrial city.The white-columned Greek Revival mansionhe built there for himself and his family wassurrounded by a garden of fruit and flowers.

Wright, James, William, and Francis wereelected to membership in the Boston Society

Dr. Francis Boott of London, noted physician and bota-nist. Photograph courtesy of Bradley R. Parker.

of Natural History soon after its founding in1830. Members of the Society were all proudamateurs in the days before professionalismtarnished the amateur image. They werecommitted to the expansion of knowledge forits own sake. As the forerunner of Boston’sMuseum of Science, the Society undertook toeducate not only its members, but the generalpublic as we11.3o

Wright Boott, and later his brother Wil-liam, joined another important new organiza-tion for sharing and spreading knowledge, theMassachusetts Horticultural Society, estab-lished in 1829. Both the Horticultural and theNatural History societies drew their mem-bers from the Boston intelligentsia and in-cluded many of the Bootts’s neighbors,friends, and business associates.

Within two years of its inception the Hor-ticultural Society held annual shows at

which members exhibited fruit, flowers, and

31

greenhouse plants. At the 1834 exhibit, inFaneuil Hall, along with Joseph Coolidge’spears and Judge Lowell’s orange trees, werethree tropical plants from the collection of J.Wright Boott, Esq.: Plumbago capensis, ablue-floweredleadwort from southern Africa ;Begonia discolor, a red-foliaged import fromAsia with fragrant pink flowers; and, lastly, awhite-flowered member of the AmaryllisFamily, Pancratium, described at the time asbeing very beautiful.3’

After the 1834 show, Wright withdrewfrom the Horticultural Society. He neverexhibited his plants again. Someone musthave offended him inadvertently. He hadbecome a moody, difficult man of marked pe-culiarity 32 His sister-in-law, Mrs. Kirk Boott,Jr., was the only Boott to enter a subsequentHorticultural Society show. According to theSociety’s 1837 Transactions (page 42~, shesubmitted a "curious Cucumber" eight feetlong. "[I]ts form reminded many of a serpent."

After his father died in 1817, Wright begana gradual retreat from business and society.Eventually he stopped going out altogether,and he spoke to almost no one. His troublesapparently began, as troubles often do, withmoney and a will. Wright was the executor ofhis father’s will and was responsible for sup-porting his mother in the family mansion,hers for her life. He was also obligated tosupport his minor siblings, as well as the or-phaned children of a cousin. Furthermore, allof Wright’s brothers and sisters were entitledto equal shares of the residue of the estate ~Unfortunately, even before division, the fam-ily fortune was not as large as Kirk’s childrenhad believed it to be. In a stagnant economy,the Bootts’s grand lifestyle had drasticallyreduced the fortune from its peak at thecentury’s start. Even by 1810, Kirk, Sr., hadforeseen that "my property will be but littlefor each when it comes to be divided."3a

Wright’s brothers joined him in their latefather’s import business for a few years, hop-ing in vain to make a go of it. By 1822, all butWright had withdrawn. In 1826, Wright in-

vested in an iron foundry started by two of hisbrothers-in-law. Before he pulled out of thatdisastrous enterprise, he had lost a good partof his own and his siblings’s inheritance.They later reminded him of this with somefrequency. From then on, despite efforts byKirk to give him an important role in theLowell textile industry, Wright never en-gaged in business again. He stayed at homewith his mother, and worked with his plants.

Even though Wright Boott had resignedfrom the Horticultural Society, his rare tropi-cal plants and his success at coaxing theminto bloom caused his name to recur often inthe Society’s annals. In 1837, for example, itwas noted that Boott’s West Indian Cactustriangularis had blossomed and that he hadimported the novel Chorizema henchmanni,an Australian evergreen with bright red flow-ers.35 He became known for imported green-house plants, particularly orchids.

His plants came from England. The Atlan-tic Ocean was not too wide for the Bootts,brought up as they were in the import busi-ness and having maintained close ties withtheir English relatives. Wright himself trav-elled to England before he became a recluse.His brothers, particularly Francis, knew theleading English botanists and plantsmen andcould easily have sent or brought plants toWright in Boston.

At an 1874 meeting of the MassachusettsHorticultural Society, Marshall P. Wilder, aformer president of the oganization and laterits historian, reminisced about the "exquisitemanner in which the amaryllis was formerlycultivated by J. W. Boott ... who receivedfrom England bulbs of new and rare varietiesworth two or three guineas each."36 Wilderalso remembered Boott’s as the only orchidcollection in the country in the early 1830s."They were cultivated in an ordinary green-house, occasionally closing a door for tem-perature control, and grew without piling upbricks and charcoal about the stem." In hisarticle on horticulture in Winsor’s 1881 His-tory of Boston, Wilder wrote that some of

32

f

Wright’s choicest plants hadbeen obtainedbyhis brother Francis from the Duke ofBedford.3’ The Sixth Duke of Bedford, proprie-tor of Woburn Abbey and an avid naturalistand botanist, owned the Covent GardenMarket, on which he built two unique roof-top conservatories in 1827 where plants weregrown, shown, and sold in a stylish setting.38

Orchids became a refined passion for manygardeners as the Nineteenth Century pro-gressed, and orchid hunters began strippingthem from their native habitats to meet thedemand. Appalling numbers of plants gath-ered in the wild succumbed to the treatmentthey received from unwitting gardeners whohad no idea how to care for them. In 1790there were only fifteen species at the RoyalBotanic Gardens at Kew, but by 1812 Lod-diges’s Nursery near London was propagatingorchids for sale.39

The orchid craze came later to the UnitedStates. In 1818, Harvard’s Botanic Gardenlisted only one orchid, Phaius grandi f olius, orBletia tankervillea?, a terrestrial orchid. Theplant explorer John Fothergill had first

brought Phaius grandifolius to England fromthe Far East in 1778. This may have beenWright Boott’s first orchid, according to ac-counts by Wilder and another HorticulturalSociety member, Edward S. Rand, Jr.’oThe epiphytic orchids were more difficult

to grow than the terrestrial, but Wright Boottapparently learned to give them the necessarylight and air. His collection included Dendro-bium orchids from Asia, Oncidium orchidsfrom Central America, and, from Brazil, theCattleya orchids, whose large blooms of cor-sage fame are actually of the color now knownas orchid.

Wright Boott’s life ended in sadness andbitterness. His mother finally left the familyhome in 1836 to spend the remainder of herlife in England with Francis and his family.Kirk, Jr., after years of trying to help Wrightimprove his own and the family fortunes,died suddenly in Lowell in 1837. James madea permanent move to England a year later.

William, who had always been close to

Wright and had helped him in the green-house, left after Wright threatened him anddrove him from the house. On the other hand,one sister, Mary Boott Lyman, newly wid-owed and in straitened circumstances,moved into the family house in 1844, as shefelt she was legally entitled to do. She livedthere for an entire year, reportedly withoutever sharing a meal with Wright, or indeedeven speaking to him-all according to condi-tions outlined by Wright before she moved in.Two young nephews also lived in the housefor a time-in idleness, according to theiraunt, who wrote Francis that the young menrose at noon and lounged about for hours, con-tinually smoking cigars.41The family, not surprisingly, became

sharply divided. Those in England, includingMrs. Boott, could only feel sorry for Wright.Removed as they were, their image of himwas blurred by fondness for the man he oncehad been. Francis wrote in 1843 to his friendAsa Gray, newly arrived in Cambridge todirect the Harvard Botanic Garden, that hehoped Gray would call at the Boott family’sBowdoin Square mansion. Francis was sureWright would be pleased to show Gray hisgreenhouse and his plants.42 In fact, it is un-likely that Gray would have been cordiallyreceived. Most of those who had to deal withWright became convinced that he was insane.The atmosphere of the Boott establish-

ment must have been distinctly unsettling.One sister, Eliza Brooks, described an 1842visit to Wright. She looked for him in thehouse and then in the garden, but "the plantswere so high I did not see him." Eventuallyshe discovered him "picking dead leaves off aplant." "

"Your dahlias are very fine," she said.He, saying nothing, retreated amongst the

dahlias while she walked along the gravelpath. "I could see Wright watching methrough the high plants," she wrote.’~

In 1845, Wright shot himself. His suicideunleashed a long and tiresome battle, waged

33

in public and in endless print, between hisbrother-in-law, Edward Brooks, and his ex-ecutor, John Amory Lowell. Lowell report-edly blamed Brooks for hounding Wright tohis death, to which rumor Brooks reacted byaccusing Lowell of trying to influence Wrightto change his will. Both men claimed theironly interests were to clear their own goodnames and to see that justice was done in thematter of inheritance.44

After obtaining his mother’s consent,Wright had sold the mansion just threemonths before he died.45 The bricks in onewall were incorporated into Revere House, agrand, new hotel soon erected on the site, butthe Boott house, greenhouse, and gardenvanished entirely.

Under Wright’s will, his precious plantswere left to John Amory Lowell, a third-generation Boston horticulturist, who tendedhis collection at the family estate in Roxbury.Lowell exhibited some of the plants at Horti-cultural Society shows. One year he entered aDendrobium orchid, formerly Boott’s, whichwas four feet high and three feet in diameter,covered with drooping racemes of fragrantyellow flowers. In 1853, Lowell sold his On-cidium orchids to the Misses Pratt of Water-town, but most of his orchids went to EdwardS. Rand of Dedham, whose collection wassaid to be the finest in the country.46 In 1876Rand’s son still owned the huge Dendrobiumwhich had belonged to Boott, as well as aCattleya crispa, "as large as a small wash-tub."When the Rand estate was sold, most of the

best plants were given to Harvard. Asa Grayhimself divided Wright’s venerable Dendro-bium and kept half for Harvard’s Botanic Gar-den. Probably the scattered offspring ofBoott’s orchids are delighting their growerstoday. In the end, they were his legacy.

EndnotesTwelve volumes of letters of Kirk Boott, Sr., are onmicrofilm at the Massachusetts Historical Society.Most of the letters were written by Kirk Boott, Sr., to hissister in Derby, England, but a number are by Wright

Boott. The letters were collected by Dr. Francis Boott,who added his own notes and comments in 1846.Francis Boott’s letters to Jacob Bigelow are in the

Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, HarvardMedical School, while his letters to Asa Gray are in theLibrary of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard UniversityHerbaria, Cambridge.The records of the Boston Society of Natural History

are at the Boston Museum of Science.

1. Kirk Boott to his mother, 3 June and 4 July 1784,Letters of Kirk Boott, Sr., Massachusetts HistoricalSociety (Microfilm Reel 1, Volume 3).

2. Note by Francis Boott, ibid., Reel 1, Volume 1, page 68.3. John Boott to his mother, ibid., 5 July 1783, Reel 1,

Volume 1.4. Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, January 1783, ibid., Reel 1,

Volume 1.5. Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, February 1783, ibid., Reel 1,

Volume 1.6. Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 13 June 1783, ibid., Reel 1,

Volume 2.7. Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 13 June 1804, ibid., Reel 2,

Volume 2.8. Kirk Boot to Eliza Boott, ibid., 22 July 1795, Reel 1,

Volume 6.9. Ibid., Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 7 January 1799, Reel

1, Volume 6.10. Ibid., Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 17 November 1802,

Reel 2, Volume 1.11. Suffolk County Deeds, Boston, Massachusetts, Vol-

ume 185, page 82, and Volume 208, page 90.12. Bulfmch’s Boston, 1787-1817, by Harold Kirker and

James Kirker, New York: Oxford University Press,1964, page 80.

13. Massachusetts Historical Society, J. W. Boott to ElizaBoott, 30 September 1805, Reel 2, Volume 2.

14. Ibid., Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 13 June 1804, Reel 2,Volume 2.

15. Ibid., Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 30 October 1787,Reel 1, Volume 4.

16. Ibid., Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 22 July 1795, Reel 1,Volume 6.

17. Ibid., Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 16 December 1805,Reel 2, Volume 2.

18. Ibid., Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 15 April 1806, Reel2, Volume 2.

19. Ibid., Kirk Boott to Eliza Boott, 10 June 1809, Reel 2,Volume 3.

20. Ibid., J. W. B. to Eliza Boott, 16 May 1807, Reel 2,Volume 3.

21. Ibid., note by Francis Boott, Reel 2, Volume 3, Page102.

22. Thomas /ef ferson’s Flower Garden at Monticello, byEdwm M. Betts and Hazlehurst B. Perkins, Char-lottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia,1971, pages 54 to 58; The Mount Vernon Gardens,

34

Robert B. Fisher, Mount Vemon, Virginia: TheMount Vemon Ladies’ Association, 1960, pages 16 to24.

23. Massachusetts Histoncal Society, Kirk Boott to ElizaBoott, February 1783, Reel 1, Volume 1.

24. The American Gardener’s Calendar, Seventh Edi-tion, by Bernard M’Mahon, Philadelphia: A.

M’Mahon, 1828, page 86.25. Massachusetts Historical Society, Kirk Boott to Eliza

Boott, 28 September 1812, Reel 2, Volume 5.26. Ibid., J. W. B. to Eliza Boott, 16 April 1806, Reel 2,

Volume 2.27. Francis Boott to Jacob Bigelow, 25 June 1817; letters

of Francis Boott, Countway Library, HarvardMedicalSchool.

28. Sedges and a spur, by George E. Gifford, Jr. HarvardMedical Alumni Bulletin, Volume 42 (Winter 1968), (,pages 23 to 26.

29. Botanical necrology for the year 1863, by Asa Gray.The American Journal of Science and the Arts, Sec-ond Series, Volume 73, page 289 (May 1864).

30. See "The Nineteenth-Century Amateur Tradition:The Case of the Boston Society of Natural History,"

"

by Sally G. Kohlstedt, pages 173 to 187 in Science andIts Public, edited by Gerald Holton and William A.Blanspied. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1976.

31. Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Transactions,1834, page 23.

32. Wright’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Kirk Boott, Jr., was theonly Boott to enter a subsequent Horticultural Soci-ety show. According to the Society’s 1837 Transac-tions (page 42), she submitted a "curious Cucumber"eight feet long. "[I]ts form reminded many of a ser-pent." "

33. A Correspondence between Edward Brooks andJohn A. Lowell. Boston: S. N. Dickinson, 1847, pas-sim.

34. Massachusetts Historical Society, Kirk Boott to ElizaBoott, 1819, Reel 2, Volume 4.

35. Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Transactions,1837-8, pages 23 and 27.

36. Ibid., 1874, Part 1, pages 25 and 34.37. The Memorial History of Boston, including Suffolk

County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880. Four volumesBoston: J. R. Osgood and Company, 1881-1883. Vol-ume 4, page 612.

38. The Glass House, by John Hix. Cambridge, Massa-chusetts : M.I.T. Press, 1974. Pages 92 to 93.

39. Kew and orchidology, by Gordon P. DeWolf, Jr.American Orchid Society Bulletin (December 1959~,Volume 28, pages 877 to 880.

40. Massachusetts Horticultural Society, Transactions,1874, page 34.

41. Correspondence between Brooks and Lowell, page115.

42. Francis Boott to Asa Gray, 1 May 1843. Francis Boottletters, Harvard University Herbaria.

43. Correspondence between Brooks and Lowell, page113.

44. Ibid.; An Answer to the Pamphlet of Mr. John A.Lowell, by Edward Brooks. Boston: Eastbum’s Press,1851.

45. Suffolk County Deeds, Volume 544, page 78.46. Orchids, by Edward Sprague Rand, Jr. New York,

1876. Pages 131 to 136.

AcknowledgmentThe Harvard University Archives provided helpful in-formation about the early careers of Francis Boott andKirk Boott, Jr.

BibliographyEdward Brooks. An Answer to the Pamphlet of Mr. John

A. Lowell. Boston: Eastbum’s press, 1851.A Correspondence between Edward Brooks and John A.

Lowell. Boston: S. N. Dickinson, 1847.Gordon P. DeWolf, Jr. Kew and orchidology. American

Orchid Society Bulletm, Volume 28, pages877 to 880 (December 1959).

George E. Gifford, Jr. Sedges and a spur. Harvard MedicalAlumni Bulletin, Volume 42 (Winter 1968),pages 23 to 26.

Asa Gray. Botanical necrology for the year 1863. TheAmerican Journal of Science and the Arts,Second Series, Volume 37 (May 1864), pages288 to 292.

John Hix. The Glass House. Cambridge, Massachusetts:M.I.T. Press, 1974.

Harold Kirker and James Kirker. Bulfinch’s Boston,1787-1817. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1964.

Bernard M’Mahan. The American Gardener’s Calendar,Seventh Edition. Philadelphia: A. M’Mahon,1828.

Bradley R. Parker. Kirk Boott: Master Spirit of EarlyLowell. Lowell, Massachusetts, 1985.

Edward Sprague Rand, Jr. Orchids. New York: Hurd andHoughton, 1876.

Merle A. Reinikka. A History of the Orchid. CoralCables, Florida: University of Miami Press,1972.

Justin Winsor. The Memorial History of Boston, includ-ing Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880. Four volumes. Boston: J. R. Osgood andCompany, 1881-1884.

Alan Emmet writes often on landscape history and gar-den history. In 1980, Harvard University’s GraduateSchool of Design published her book-length study ofchanges in the landscape of Cambridge, Massachusetts;more recently, several of her articles on garden historywere published in Garden History, The Journal of Gar-den History, and other English journals.

Index to Volume 47

(Numbers m parentheses refer to issues, those m boldface to illustrauons.J

"A Diversity of Hollies," Polly Hill,( 1 ): 2-13

"A Life Redeemed: Susan DelanoMcKelvey and the Arnold Arbore-tum," Edmund A. Schofield, (4):9-23

Abies homolepis, (2) : 14mariesii, (2): 12maximowiczii, (2): 14sachahnensis, (2/: 5shikokianum, (2): 12vietchii, (2): 12, 14Acer alpzna, (2): 8buergeranum, (2~: 4-:,arpmifohum, (2): 12

japonicum, (2): 14mono var. mayrii, (2): 7montanum," (3): 8Adams, Rev. William, (4): 10Agassiz, Louis, (4) : 11 1Aglaonema, (2): 27Ajuda (Lisbon), (3): 32Royal Garden of, original plan

of, (3): 33Palace of (Lisbon), (3) : 37 7-Botanical Garden (Lisbon), (3):

back cover-quarter (Lisbon), (3): inside

front cover, 32

Albuquerque (New Mexico) (4): 14Aldrich, Chester Holmes /4~: 10Altamaha River (Georgia), (4): 4Almeida Monteiro, Antonio de, and

Jules Janick, "The ’Tapada daAjuda,’ Portugal’s First BotanicalGarden," (3): 30-38 8

Alstrcxmeria h~mantha, (3): 15Alvarez de Faria, Manuel Godoy, (3):

19Abies sachabnensis, (2/: 7American Gardener’s Chronicle, (4):

28Andrade Corvo, Joao de, (3): 37 7Andre, Carl, (2~: 9Anthoensen, Frederick W., (4): 21Anthoensen Press, (4): 21Anthurium, (2): 27Apache Lodge (Arizona), (4): 15Araceae, (2): 27Araucaria excelsa, (3): 36Aris~ma, (2): 27, 29-32, 33flowering of, (2): 29

candidissimum, (2): 30, 32dracontium, (2~: 29, 30

-fargesii, (2): 32, 33-japonicum, (2): 31, 33ringens, (2): 31, 32forma pr~cox, (2): 32forma sieboldii, (2): 32-serratum, (2): 30, 31, 31sikokianum, (2): front cover,

29-thunbergii, (2): 31 1ssp. pusillum, (2) : 30var. quinatum, (2): 30var. urashima, (2): 30tziphyllum, (2): 29ssp. stewardsonii, (2): 29-30

ssp. triphyllum, (2): 29’Zebnnum’, (2): 29Arisarum, (2): 27Arizona (4): 18Ashevilfe (North Carolina), (4): 4Artemisia norvegica, (2): 7Arum, mousetail, (2): 32~3Arum Family, (2): 27Arum, (2) : 27, 33~4-italicum, (2): 29, 33var. italicum, (2): 33ssp. neglectum, (2): 33-maculatum, (2): 33’Marmoratum’, (2): 33’Pictum’, (2) : 33Asarum, /2): 32~3-proboscideum, (2): 32Asahi, Mount (Japan), (2): 5, 5Asparagus plumosa, (3/: 38aster, New England, (2): 18Aster novx-anglia?, (2): 18Athyrium go;ringianum ’Pictum’,

(2): 30Austrich, Ricardo R., photographs

by, (3): 2, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29"El Real Jardin Botanico dcMadnd and the Glorious Historyof Botany in Spain," (3): 2-24and J. Walter Bram, "The

Madrid Botanical Garden Today:A Brief Photographic Portfolio,"

"

(3) : 25-29Awa Odon, (2): 11 1azalea, pink shell, (4): 3Bailey Arboretum (Locust Valley,New York), (1): front cover

Bailey Plan, (4): 21Bamades, Miguel, (3): 9~eath of, 13): 9

Bamhart, John Hendley, (4): 19Barstow, John, and Kate Gridley,book review by, (3): 39-40

Bartram, William, (4): 3Bedford, Sixth Duke of, (4): 32Begonia discolor, (4):31 1Belem, Palace of (Lisbon), (3): 37 7Tower of (Lisbon), (3) : 37 7Berckmans’ Nursery, P. J. (4): 4Bermudas, A. (architect), (3): 31 1Betula ermanii, (2) : 7lenta, (2): 27Bibliotheca Botamca (1751), (3): 3 3Big Hammock Natural Area

(Georgia), (4): 4Bigelow, Jacob, (4): 29Bigelow’s Lawn, (4): 29Biltmore Forest (North Carolina), (4):

4

birch, black, (2): 27Bletia tankervillex, (4): 32bloodroot, (2): 27Bonpland, Aime, (3): 16"Books" (column), (1): 26~2; (2): 35-

36 ; (3): 39-40Boott, Francis, (4): 25~4J. Wright, Esq., (4) : 31 1James, (4): 30Mrs. Kirk, Jr., (4): 31William, (4): 30Boott Spur, (4): 29Boottia cordata, (4) : 30"borrowed scenery," (2): 11 1Boston (Massachusetts), (3): 7; (4):

24, 26 27, 28, 29Boston Athenxum, (4): 21, 22Boston Society of Natural History,

(4) : 30Botanic Garden (Harvard Univer-

sity), (4): 32, 33Botanical Exploration of the Trans-

Mississippi West, by SusanDelano McKelvey /1955), (3): 21;(4): 21

Botanical Museum (HarvardUniversity), (4) : 19

"Botany: The State of the Art"(column), /1): 20-25

Boufford, David E., book review by,/ 1 26-27

Bozeman, Dr. John, (4): 4Brain, J. Walter, photographs by, /2):

23, 28and Ricardo R. Austrich,

36

"The Madrid Botanical GardenToday: A Brief PhotographicPortfolio," (3): 25-29

British Iris Society, (4) : 15British Museum (Natural History),

(4): 13Britton, Nathaniel Lord, (4): 16Brooks, Edward, (4): 33Eliza, (4): 32Brotero, Felix da Silva de Avellar, (3): (:37 7

Brugmansia sanguinea, (3): 15Bryanthus gmelinii, (2): 5Bryn Mawr College (4): 9, 10Bulfinch, Charles, (4) : 27cactus, pincushion, (2): 23Cactus triangularis, (4/: 31 1Caladium, (2) : 27California, (4): 17California Academy of Sciences, (4):

12Calla, (2) : 27Canary Islands, (3): 13Canoochee River (Georgia), (4): 4 4"captured landscape," (2): 11 1"Cardamindum ampliori," (3/: 7, 9Carex spp., (4): 30castor bean, (4): 28Castroviejo, Santiago, (3): 22Cattleya spp., (4): 32crispa, (4): 33Cavanilles, Antonio Jose, (3): 19-21 1Cervantes, Vicente, (3): 16Carvalho e Mello, Sebastiao Jos6 de

(Marques de Pombal), (3~: 30, 31 1Caryophillidae, (3): 27Cascais (Portugal), (3): 37 7Centennial Gold Medal (Massachu-

setts Horticultural Society), (4): 14Cereus giganteus, (2): 22, 24Chamxcyparis obtusa, (2): 14Chapultepec (hill) (Mexico), (3): 16Charles Sprague Sargent Memorial

Fund, (4): 13, 21-22Charles I (Carlos I) (King of Spain),

(3 ): 9Charles III (Carlos III) (King of

Spain), (3): 6, 10, 11, 12, 15Charles IV (King of Spain), (3): 18Chile, (3): 12, 13, 14, 15Chorizema henchmanni, (4/: 31 1Cinchona sp., (3): 15"Clonal and Age Differences in theRooting of Metasequoia glyp-tostroboides Cuttings," John E.Kuser, (1/: 14-19

Collet, Lady, (4): 15-Sir Mark, (4): 15Colocasia esculenta, (2): 27Colombia, (3): 16Colorado, (4): 19

Columbia University School ofArchitecture, (4): 10

Commission on the Renovation ofthe Executive Mansion, (4): 11 1

Committee to Visit the ArnoldArboretum, (4): 13, 22

coneflower, Tennessee purple, (2):20,23

Coolidge, Joseph, (4): 31 1Cornus florida, (2): 27Corylus heterophylla, (2): 7-sieboldiana, (3): 40Cosmos, (3) : 19spp., (3): 18sulphureus, (3): 13Couto, C. (architect), (3): 31Covent Garden Marketplace, (4):32Creech, Dr. John, (2): 31, 33Crow Castle (Japan), (2): 13, 13Cryptomeria japonica, (2) : 12Cuba, (3) : 12"Cultivating Native Plants: The

Possibilities," Susan Storer, (2):16-19

Cupressus macrocarpa, (2) : 15Curtis, Will C., (2): 16Cypripedium spp., (2): 22, 23-calceolus, (2): 21, 22Dahlia, (3): 19spp., (3): 18Daisetsuzan National Park (Japan),

(2): 4-6,5 5Dall, Curtis B., (4): 11 1-Mr., (4): 11 1William Healy, (4): 11 1damp-off disease, (4): 7Datura sanguinea, (3) : 15de Jussieu, Antoine, (3): 19Joseph, (3): 15Del Tredici, Peter, (3): 39"Lost and Found: Elliottia

racemosa, (4): 2-8Delano, Eugene, (4) : 10Moreau, (4): 10,13, 17, 18, 19Susan Adams, (4): 9-Susan Magoun, (4): 9, 10-Susan Magoun Adams, (4):10-William Adams, (4): 10-11, 13& Aldrich (architecture firm),

(4) : 10Dendrobium sp., (4): 33spp., (4):32Derby (England), (4): 24, 25Descripciones de las PlantasDemonstrandas en las LeccionesPublicas, by Antonio Jos~ Cava-nilles, (3): 19

Desert Botanical Garden, photo-graph by, (2): 23

Dieffenbachia, (2): 27Dilleniidae, (3): 27

Dion~a muscipula, /2): 21dogwood, (2): 27Dombey, Joseph, (3) : 15Don, David, (3): 21Dracxna draco, (3) : 38Dry Landscape, (2): 9Dryopteris boottii, (4): 30Earthquake of 1755 (Lisbon), (3):

inside front coverEastwood, Alice, (4): 12, 13, 14, 15,

16, 17, 18, 19, 20, back coverEchinacea tennesseensis, (2): 20, 23~,cole des Beaux-Arts (Paris), (4): 10Edlmann, Violet F. (Lady Collet), (4):

14, 15photograph by, (4): 15Edo (Japan), (2): 3Edo Period (Japan), (2): 9"Eight Views of Nippon," Robert G.

Nicholson, (2): 2-15Einset, John W., "Botany: The State

of the Art," (column), (1): 20-25"How Development’s

Clock Guides Evolution," (1): 20-25

"El Real Jardin Botanico de Madridand the Glorious History ofBotany in Spain," Ricardo R.Austrich, (3): 2-24

El Reno (Oklahoma), (4): 19Elliott, Stephen, (4) : 3, 4Elliottia racemosa, (2): 5; (4): front

cover, 2, 2-8, 5-a.ultivation of, (4): 7-distribution of, (4): 3, 4-ecology of, (4) : 4-5seeds of, (4) : 6germination of, (4): 5-7Emily Renwick Achievement Medal

(Garden Club of America), (4): 14Empetrum sp., (2): 14nigrum, (2) : 7var. japonicum, (2): 5, 14Engstrand, Iris H. W., (3) : 18Enkianthus perulatus, (2) : 4Ensenada, Marques de la, (3) : 5Escola Polit~cnica (Lisbon), (3): 38escuelas bot6nicas, (3) : 11, 22, 28Estoril (Portugal), (3): 37Ewan, Joseph, (4):21 1Expedici6n Botanica al Reino deNueva Espana, (3): 16

Fagus crenata, (2) : 12Faneuil Hall (Boston), (4) : 31 1Faxon, Charles Edward, drawing by,

(3): inside back cover, 2Ferdinand VI (King of Spain), (3): 4, 5fem, Japanese, (2): 30Ficus benjamina, (3): 38elastica, (3): 36-macrophylla, (3/: 38

37

fir, Shikoku, (2): 12Fischer, Cecil E. C., (4): 13Flora Espanola, by Jose Quer y

Martinez, (3): 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 8, 9Flora Iberica, (3): 22Flora Mexicana, (3) : 18Flora of Japan, by Jisaburo Ohwi, (2):32,34

Flora Peruviana, et Chilensis, (3): 15Flora Republic~ Popularis Sinicx,

(2): 32"Flowering Trees and Shrubs: The

Botanical Paintings of EstherHeins," by Judith Leet (reviewed),(3 39-40

Flowers for the King, by ArthurRobert Steele, mentioned, (3): 15

-quoted, (3): 4, 6Fordham, Alfred J., (4): 5Forrest, George, (2): 30Foster, H. Lincoln, garden of, (2):

front cover, 32, 34Laura Louise, (2): 34Fothergill, Dr. John (3) : 11-12; (4): 32Fragaria chiloensis, (3): 8Franco, Francisco, (3) : 22French, Peggy, (2): 29Fritillaria camtschatcensis, (2/: 7Fuchsia corymbiflora, (3): 15magellanica var. macrostema,

(3): 15Fuji, (2): 15Garden in the Woods (Framingham,

Massachusetts), (2) : inside frontcover, 16, 17, 22

Garden of Ajuda, (3): 34, 35Gardenesque style, (2) : 10Gathering the Desert, by Gary PaulNabhan (reviewed), (2/: 35~6

General Catalogue of All Plants inthe Royal Botanical Garden ofA~uda, by F~lix da Silva deAvellar Brotero, (3): 37 7

Georgia plume, (4): front cover, 2, 2-8,5,7 7

-cultivation of, (4):7~cology of, (4) : 4-5Geum pentapetalum, (2/: 5ginger, European, (2): 17 7Gzngko biloba, (2) : 4; (4) : 3Glacier National Park, (4): 11-12Gladwyne (Pennsylvania), (4): 4Clasnevm, (3): 36Clattstem, Judy, book review by, (1/: ( :29~0"Hardy Aroids in the

Garden," (2): 27~4photographs by, (2): 28, 31,

33, back coverGlen Road Iris Gardens, [4): 15G6mez Ortega, Casimiro, (3): 6, 9,

10, 11, 13, 16, 19, 22Cray, Asa, (4): 4, 32Cray Herbarium, (4) : 13Great Northern Railroad, (4): 12Green Swamp (North Carolina-

South Carolina), (2): 21Greene, Gardiner, (4): 27, 28Gridley, Kate, and John Barstow,book review by, (3): 39-40

Grimaldi, Marques de, (3): 10Hanke, Thaddaus, (3): 1, 19, 21Halenia sp., (2): 14Hamilton, Oscar Edward, (4): 14, 15,

16, 17, 19, 21, 22"Hardy Aroids in the Garden," Judy

Glattstein, (2): 27-34Harvard Alumni Bulletin, (4) : 19Harvard University Press, (4): 21Heins, Esther, (3): 39-40Hemerocallis sp., (2): 12, 14-middendorfii, (2): 6Henry, Mary, (4): 4Henry Foundation, (4): 4, 5Hemandez, Francisco, (3) : 4, 14Hemandez Expedition, (3): 4Hexastylis spp., (2): 27Hicks, Jennifer H., photograph by,

(2): front coverHill, Polly, "A Diversity of Hollies," "

(1): 2-13Historia General y Natural de las

Indias, by Gonzalo Femandez deOviedo y Valdes, /3): 4 4

Hohman, Henry, (4): 5, 6Hokkaido (Japan), (2): 4, 5, 6, 30, 31 1hollies, deciduous, (1): 9common, ( 1 6 6Honshu (Japan), (2): 12, 12, 14, 30, 31 1Hooker, Sir William Jackson, (4): 30Hope, John, (3 12Horticulture, (4): 13, 17Hosta sp., (2): 14-rectifolia, (2): 6"How Development’s Clock Guides

Evolution," John Emset, (1): 20-25Howard, Richard A., (4): 21, 22Humboldt, Alexander von, (3): 16Hydrangea sikokiana, (2): 12Ilex ’Apollo’, ( 1 9 9-’Lydia Morris’, (1): 1

’Sparkleberry’, ( 1 9 9Ilex aquifolium, (1): 6 6Ilex ciliospinosa, ( 1 ): 8cornuta ’Bufordii’, ( 1 1, back

cover

Ixvigata, (1): 10-opaca, ( 1 2, 4fruiting branch of, (1): (:

front cover

-pedunculosa, (1): inside backcover

serrata, ( 1 9 9-verticillata, (1): 9 9Indio, California, (4): 19Instituto Superior de Agronomia

(Lisbon), (3): 38Instruccion sobre el Modo Mas

Seguro y Econbmico de Transpor-tar Plantas Vivas por Mar y PorTierra 6 los Pafses Mas Distantes,by Casimiro Gomez Ortega, (3): (:13-14

Intemational Association ofBotanical Gardens, European-Mediterranean Division, (3): 38

invern6culo (Madrid BotamcalGarden), (3): 27, 28, 29

"Isabellino" style, (3): 22, 27Iwasaki, Baron, (2): 4Jack, John C., (4): 11 1jack-in-the-pulpit, Japanese, (2): 17Janick, Jules, and Antonio de

Almeida Monteiro, "The ’Tapadada Ajuda,’ Portugal’s FirstBotanical Garden," (3): 30~8 8

Japanese Alps, (2): 14Jardim Botanico da Ajuda, 0, (3): 30-

38, inside front cover, back coverJardin Botanico de Migas Calientes,

El, (3): 6, 8Jardin Botanico del Soto de Migas

Calientes, El (Madnd), (3): 5Jeronimos, Monastery of (Lisbon),

(3): 37Jose I (King of Portugal), (3) : 31, 32Journal of the Arnold Arboretum,

(4): 18, 19Journal of the Royal Horticultural

Society, (4): 13Judd, William H., (4) : 9kaiya-shiki, (2): 9Kalopanax pictus, (2): 12Kamakura Period (Japan), (2): 9Kamo, Kyushu (Japan), (1): inside

back coverKaresansui, (2): 9Kew Gardens (England), (4): 4, 13, 28Kikugetsu-tei, (2): 10King, G. R., photograph by, (3): 21 1Kingsville Nurseries, (4): 5, 6Koller, Gary L., (2): 3Koraku-en (Japan), (2): 12Koraku Garden (Japan), (2): 12-13Krebs, William, photograph by, (2):

22

Kudo, Yushun, (2): 7Kuser, John E., "Clonal and Age

Differences in the Rooting ofMetasequoia glyptostroboides," "

( 1 ): 14-19Kuser, John E., photographs by, ( 1 ):

inside front cover, 15, 16, 17, 18

38

Kyoto (Japan), (2): 3, 8, 9Kyushu, (2): 31 1lady’s-slipper, yellow, (2): 21, 22Lagerstrcemia indica, (3): 36Lamy (New Mexico), (4): 14Landscape Architecture, (4): 13Las Vegas (New Mexico), (4): 14leadwort, (4): 31 1Lilac: A Monograph, The, (4): 13, 14,

16 6

Leet, Judith, Flowering Trees andShrubs: The Botanical Paintingsof Esther Heins (reviewed), (3): 39-40

L’Heritier de Brunelle, CharlesLouis, (3): 12

Leiden Botanic Garden, (2): 32, 33Lilium superbum, (2): 17lily, Turk’s-cap, (2): 17Lima, Barbosa, drawing by, (3): 34Lindera obtusiloba, (2) : 14Link, Johann Heinrich Friedrich,

quoted, (3): 36Linnxa borealis, (2): 7Linn~us, (3): 3, 4, 6, 7, 9bust of, (3): 29Linnean Society of London, (4): 30Lisbon, (3): inside front coverlocust, black, (3) : 7 7Loddiges’s Nursery, (4): 32Ldfling, Pehr, (3) : 6 6Loiseleuria procumbens, (2): 7London, (4): 24Longland, David, (2): 1Lord, Elizabeth M., photographs by,

( 1 23, 24Losada, Duque de, (3): 10"Lost and Found: Elliottiaracemosa, Peter Del Tredici, (4):2-8

Love, Mary, (4): 25Lowell, John Amory, (4): 33Lowell (Massachusetts), (4): 30, 32Lyman, Mary Boott, (4): 32Theodore, (4): 25-26, 28Lynch, John A., photograph by, (2):

inside front cover, 1, 17, 18Lysichiton, (2): 27-americanum, (2): 28, back

cover

-camtschatcense, (2): 6Madrid, Real Jardin Bot£nico de, (3) :

2-29, 2, 12, 23, 25-29plans of, (3): 11, 25, 27Madrid Botanical Garden, (3): 2-29,

2, 12, 23, 25-29plans of, (3): 11, 25, 27view of in summer, (3): 2"Madrid Botanical Garden Today: A

Brief Photographic Portfolio,The," (3): 25-29

Magnolia ashei, (2): 7-hypoleuca, (2): 7macrophylla, (2): 7-tripetala, (2/: 7vizginiana, (2/: 4Malaspina, Alejandro, (3): 18, 19Malaspina Expedition, (3) : 13, 14,

18-19, 21landfalls (map), (3): 20Mangelsdorf, Paul C., (4): 19, 22Manuelino style, (3) : 37 7Many Glacier, (4) : 12Maria Luisa of Parma (Queen of

Spain), (3) : 19Marion, North Carolina, (2/: 14Massachusetts Horticultural

Society, (4) : 21, 30, 31 1Mattiazzi, Julio, (3/: 31, 32Mazatzal Mountains (Arizona), (4):

15

McKelvey, Charles Wylie, (4): 10, 16,17 7

-Delano, (4): 11 1-Susan Adams Delano, (4): 9-

23

McMahan, Linda R., "CultivatingNative Plants: The Legal Pitfalls," "

(2): 20-24photographs by, (2): 21, 24Menzies, Archibald, (3): 21Merrimack Manufacturing Com-

pany, (4): 30Metasequoia glyptostroboides, (1):

15trunk of, (1): inside front

cover

Mexico, (3) : 13Mexico City, (3): 16Mezitt, Edmund, (4): 8Michener, David C., review by, (2/:35-36

Migas Calientes, (3): 5, 6, 9, 10El Jardin Botanico de,

plan of, (3) : 6Minuart, Juan, (3) : 6 6Missouri Botanical Garden, (4): 17 7Miyabe, Kingo, (2): 4, inside back

cover

M’Mahon, Bernard, (4) : 28Mocino, Jose Mariano, (3 16explorations of in New

Spain (map/, (3): 18Monastery of Jeronimos (Lisbon), (3):37 7

Monstera, (2): 27Monteiro, Antonio de Almeida,

photographs by, (3): 35, 36, 37,back cover

Monterey, California, (3/: 1, 19Moore, David, quoted, (3/: 36Muhlenberg, Gotthilf, (4): 3

Murillo Gate (Madrid BotanicalGarden), (3): 27

Muromachi Period (Japan), (2): 9Mutisia clematis, (3): front coverMutis y Bosfo, Jos~ Celestino Bruno,

(3): 1, 14, 15, 16, 17Nabhan, Gary Paul, Gathering the

Desert (reviewed), (2): 35-36Napoleon, invades Spain, (3): 21 1Nara (Japan), (2) : 3nasturtium, (3): 7National Arboretum (Washington,

D.C.), (1): 9National Capital Park and Planning

Commission, (4): 11 1National Horticultural Journal, (4): ( :

19"Native Plant Societies in theUnited States," (2): 25-26

Nee, Luis, (3): 18, 19Nevada, (4): 17 7New England Wild Flower Society,

(2): inside front cover, 16, 22, 25New Granada (Colombia), (3): 14, 15,

17 7New Mexico, (4): 14, 19New Spain (Mexico), (3) : 4, 14New York Botanical Garden, (2): ( :

back coverNew York Herald Tribune, (4): 13New York Times, (4): 13Nicholson, Robert G., (2): 1"Eight Views of Nippon," "

(2): 2-15photographs by, (2): 1, 2, 4-

8, 10-14Nihei, Takeo, (2): 34Nolia longifolia, (3): 37, 38Nootka Sound, (3): 18 8North Carolina Department of

Agriculture, (2): 21North Carolina Botanical Garden,

(2): 21oak, white, (2): 27Ocmulgee River (Georgia), (4): 4Okayama, Lord of, (2): 12, 13, 13Oklahoma, (4): 19Olmsted, Frederick Law, (3): 11 1Omei, Mount (China), (3): 32, 33Oncidium spp., (4) : 32orchid, (4): 32, 33lady’s-slipper, (2): 23Ortega, Jose, (3): 5, 6, 7, 8, 9Oxytropis rislnriensis, (2): 8Oyster Bay, Long Island (New York),

(4): 10,16Pabell6n Villanueva (Madrid

Botanical Garden), (3): 28, 29Padua Botanic Garden, (3): 8 8Palace of Ajuda (Lisbon), (3): 37 7Palace of Belem (Lisbon), (3): 37 7

39

Palma-Christi, (4): 28Pampanini, Renato, (4) : 13Pancratium, (4): 31 1Paseo del Prado (Madrid), (3): 5, 6,

10,23Patterson, C. J., review by, ( 1/: 30-32Pav6n y Jimenez, Jose Antonio, (3) :

15, 16, 19Pecos Canyon (New Mexico), (4): 14Pediocactus spp., (2): 20peeblesianus var. peebles-

ianus

Pennsylvania Horticultural Society,(4): 14

Perenyi, Eleanor, mentioned, (3): 3Peni, (3): 7, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18Phaius grandifolius, (4): 32Phellodendzon amurense, (2/: 7Philip II (Felipe II) (King of Spain),

(3):4 4Philodendron, (2): 27Phlox divaricata, (2): 28-stolonifera, (2/: 28Phyllodoce aleutica, (2): 5Phytophthora, (4): 7Picea, (2) : 7-glehnii, (2/: 7jezoensis, (2): 5, 7koyama, (2): 14-maximowiczii, (2): 14pine, Japanese stone, (2): 5, 7, 7Pineda y Ramirez, Antonio, (3) : 19Pinella, (2): 34-ternata, (2): 34tzipartita, (2/: 34Pinus ayacahuite, (2): 15parviflora, (2/: 11 1pentaphylla, (2): 12pumila, 5, 7, 7, 14, 14’Dwarf Blue’, (2): 8-Sasa zone (2): 8-thunbergiana, (2): 4, 10Pittosporum tobira, (3): 36-undulatum, (3/:36Plantx ~quinoctiales, by Alexandervon Humboldt and Aime

Bonpland (1808), (3): 16, 17Plantas de Nueva Espaiia, (3): 18Plumbago capensis, (4): 31 1Pombal, Marques de, (3): inside front

cover, 31, 37monument to, (3): 30Portola (California), (4): 17Potrero de Atlampa (Mexico), (3): 16Prado Art Museum, (3): 6, 10Pratt, the Misses, (4): 33Prenanthes boottii, (4): 29Primula sieboldii, (2): 30Prunus subhirtella ’Pendula’, (3 ): 40Puerta del Rey, La (Madrid Botanical

Garden), (3): 12, 23, 25

Puye (New Mexico), (4): 14Quer y Martinez, Jos6, (3): 4, 5; 5, 6,

7death of, (3): 9Quercus alba, (2): 27Quinta de Don Lazaro (Lisbon), (3):32

Raisz, Erwin, (4): 21Rand, Edward S., Jr., (4): 32Real Expedition al Nuevo Reino de

Granada, (3): 15Real Jardin Botanico de M6xico, (3):

16Real Jardin Botanico de Madrid, (3): ):

2-29, 2, 12, 23, 25-29plans of, (3): 11, 25, 27view of in summer, (3): 2Real Jardin Bot~nico del Soto deMigas Calientes, (3): 5

Rebun Island (Japan), (2): 6-8Redout6, Pierre Joseph, (4): 28redwood, coast, (3): 19, 21, inside

back coverRehder, Alfred, (4): 13, 16photographs by, (1): 4, 10Reno (Nevada), (4): 16, 17 7Repton, Humphry, (2): 10; (4): 26"Research Report," (column), (1): (:

14-19Rhododendron sp., (2): 12spp., (4): 6-aureum, (2): 5camtschaticum, (2): 8-;,hapmanii, (2): 20, 22japonicum, (2): 14-metternichii, (2): 14vaseyi, (4): 3rhododendron, Chapman’s, (2): 20,22

Rhodora (joumal), (4): 13, 21Ricinus communis, (4): 28Rikugi-en (Tokyo), (2) : 3-4, 4Rishiri Island (Japan), (2): 6-8, 6, 7Ritsurin Garden (Japan), (2): 9-11, 10Robinia pseudoacacia, (3): 7Rock, Joseph F. C., (4): 17 7Rogers, Dr. George, (4): 4Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, (4): 9,

11, 19Rosa spinosissima, (4): 28Rosamond (ship), (4): 24Royal Botanic Garden (Edinburgh),

(3): 12-(Kew), (4): 30, 32Royal Botanical Garden (Madrid), (3):

2-29, 2, 12, 23, 25-29plans of, (3): 11, 25, 27view of in summer, (3): (:2

Royal Garden of Ajuda (Lisbon), planof, (3): 33

Royal Gate (Madrid BotanicalGarden), (3): 23

Royal Scientific Expedition to NewSpain, (3): 16

Ruiz and Pavon Expedition, (3): 13,14, 15

Ruiz and Pavon Pavilion (MadridBotanical Garden), (3): 23

Ruiz L6pez, Hip6lito, (3): 15, 16, 19Royan-ji Temple Garden (Japan), (2):

8-9,8 8Sabatini, Francisco, (3): 10saguaro, (2): 24Saguaro National Monument

(Arizona), (2): 24Sakhalm Island (U.S.S.R.), (2): 6, 7Salazar Bridge (Lisbon), (3): 37 7Salix sp., (2): 8Salvador family (Barcelona), (3): 6San Francisco Mountams (Arizona),

(4): 15Sanguinea canadensis, /2): 27Santa Cruz, California, (3): 21Santamour, Dr. Frank S., (4) : 5, 7Santos, F. (sculptor), (3): 31 1Sapporo Botanical Garden (Japan),

(2/: 4-5, 6Sara Gildersleeve Fife MemorialAward (New York BotanicalGarden), (4): 21

Sargent, Charles Sprague, (4): 9, 11,12, 13, 21

Sasa sp., (2): 7-kurilensis, (2): 7Sax, Karl, (4): 18-19, 21 1Schaffer Memorial Medal (Pennsyl-

vania Horticultural Society), (4):14

Schneider, Camillo K., (4): 13Schofield, Edmund A., "A Life

Redeemed: Susan DelanoMcKelvey and the ArnoldArboretum," (4): 9-23

Schotia afra, (3) : 38Scientific Monthly, (4) : 13Sedum cauticolum, (2): 8Sequoia sempervirens, (3): 19, 21,

inside back coverSesse and Mocino Expedition, (3):

16, 18Sess6 y Lacasta, Martin de, (3): 16shakkei, (2) 11 1shield fem, Boott’s, (4): 30Shikoku (Japan), (2): 9, 10, 12, 30, 31 1Shiun, Mount (Japan), (2): 11 1Shortia sp., (2): 14soldanelloides, (2):14Sierra Nevada, (4): 17 7Silva Delgado, Leandro, (3): 22, 23watercolor by, (3): 27Silva of North America, The, (1): 3;

40

(3 ): 1Simancas, Archivo General de, (3): 9 9Six Month Residence and Travels in

Mexico, by W. Bullock (1824), (3): (:16 6

Skimmia japonica var. repens, (2): 7skunk cabbage, (2): 28Smith, E. LaVeme, photograph by,

/2): 22Smithsonian Institution, (4): 11 1smooth winterberry, ( 1 10snow rice-cake plant, (2): 30Sociedad de Historia Natural de

Mexico, (3) : 18Sophora japonica, (3): 38Sorbus matsumarx, (2) : 5Soto de Migas Calientes, El (Madrid),

(3) :5, 7-8Spanish Civil War, (3): 22Spanish Scientists in the New

World, by Iris H. W. Engstrand,(3): 18 8

Steele, Arthur Robert, Flowers forthe King, mentioned, (3): 15

---duoted, (3): 4, 6mentioned, (3): 22"Stone Field Sculpture," by Carl

Andre, (2) : 9Storer, Susan, "Cultivating Native

Plants: The Possibilities," (2): 16-19 9

Strelitzia reginx, (3) : 38Stuart, Gilbert, (4): 27Sturtevant, Grace, (4): 14, 15Sunflower Mine (Arizona), (4): 15 5Sunol, Jose, (3): 5, 7Sung Period (China), (2): 9Susanville (California), (4): 17Symplocarpus, (2): 27fcetidus, (2): 27, 28Syosset (New York), (4): 10Syringa, (4): 13-rugulosa, (4): 13Tagus River (Portugal), (3): 31, 37 7Tahoe, Lake (California-Nevada),

(4): 17 7Takamatsu (Japan), (2): 9, 10, 11 1tapada, (3) : 32, 35Tapada da Ajuda, (3) : 30-38, inside

front cover, back cover"’Tapada da Ajuda,’ Portugal’s First

Botanical Garden, The," Antoniode Almeida Monteiro and JulesJanick, (3): 30,38

Tapada das Necessidades, (3): 32taro, (2) : 27Taxodium sempervirens, (3): 21 1Technical University of Lisbon, (3):

38

Tejo, Rio (Portugal), (3): 31 1Tenerife, (3): 13Teune, Carla, (2) : 32, 33Texas, (4): 19"The Madrid Botanical Garden

Today: A Brief PhotographicPortfolio," Ricardo R. Austrichand J. Walter Brain, (3): 25-29

Thujopsis dolobrata, (2): 14Tizon, Ventura Rodriguez, (3): 7Tokushima (Japan), (2): 11 1Torreya nucifera, (2): 13Toumefort, (3): 4, 6Toumefortian nomenclature, (3): 7,

8

Trelease, William, (4): 16, 17 7Trillium, large-flowering, (2): inside

front cover-showy, (2): inside front coverTrillium, (2): 27-grandiflorum, (2): inside front

cover

Tripetaleia bracteata, (2) : 5Tropxolum majus, (3) : 7, 9Truman, President, (4): 10Tsuga sp., (2): 11-diversifolia, (2): 12, 14-sieboldii, (2): 12Tsujii, Tatsuichi, (2): 4-5Tsunamasa, Ikeda, (2): 13, 13Tsurugi, Mount, (2) : 11-12, 11Tucson Mountains (Arizona), (4): 15Twenty-first of April Bridge (Lisbon),

(3): 37Ulmus davidiana var. japonica, (2):

7United States Fish and Wildlife

Service, (2): 20, 21, 23; (4): 4Urashima, Taro, (2): 30urashima-so, (2): 30Utah, (4) : 19Vaccinium sp., (2): 14-spp., (2): 14

vitis-idxa, (2): 7Valdes, Gonzalo Femandez de

Oviedo y, (3) : 4"Vale," "The," (4): 26, 28, 29Valencia, (3): 13-University of, (3): 19Vancouver Expedition, (3): 21 1landfalls (map), (3): 20Vandelli, Domingos (Domenico), (3):31,37

Velez, Cristobal, (3): 6Venus’s-flytrap, (2): 21, 21Viburnum tinus, (3) : 22Waki (Japan), (2): 11 1Wakkanai (Japan), (2): 6Wall Ricardo, (3): 5Wallace, Alfred Russel, (4): 12Warren, Richard, book review by,

( 1 27-29Washington, Mount (New Hamp-

shire), (4): 29Weeks, Edward, (4): 20, 22Welwitsch, Friedrich Martin Josef,

(3) : 37White Mountains (New Hampshire),

(4): 12Whitehill, Walter Muir, (4): 21, 22Wilder, Marshall P., (4): 31, 32Wilson, Ernest H., (2): 5, 7, 14; (4):

13, 18 8photograph by, (2): inside

back cover

Wilton, Connecticut, (2): 27, 29Winterberry, smooth, ( 1 10witch hazel, Chinese, (2): 17 7Writers and Friends, by EdwardWeeks, (4): 20, 22

Wyman, Donald, photograph by, ( 1 ):back cover

Xanthosoma spp., (2): 27Yatsugadake, Mount, (2): 14, 14yatsuhashi, (2): 13yautia, (2): 27Yoshino River (Japan), (2): 11 1Yoshiyasu, Yanagisawa, (2): 4Yucca, (4): 14, 19Yuccas of the Southwestern United

States, (4): 19yuki-mochi-so, (2): 30Yukon, (4): 12Yunnan (China), (2): 30

CORRECTIONIn the article on the Jardim Botanico daAjuda (Arnoldia, volume 47, number 3,pages30-38), one of the authors’s nameswas misspelled. The correct spelling isAntonio de Almetda Monteiro.

fA/ ~E ~~J~ Number 2

~~

Fall 1987

FROM THE ARNOLD ARBORETUMRAIN DIDN’T DAMPEN SALES OR SPIRITS

AT ANNUAL SALE AND AUCTION

Mrs. F. Stanton Deland and Mr. Melville Chapin, both members of the Visiting Committee of the Arnold Arboretum ofHarvard University, havefront-row seats for the plant auction. (Photograph courtesy of Laurie Belisle.)Even in torrents of rain, theannual plant sale and auc-tion was a well staged showof more than 4.000 rare andunusual plants. Serious gar-deners and staunch sup-porters in rain slickers andrubber boots were good tothemselves and to the Arbo-retum, spending more than$25,000 on hard-to-findwoody plants, houseplants,books, specialty items, andlunch from the harvest table.

For the first time, the Arbo-retum Associates, the volun-teers who have organizedand hosted the spectacularrare-plant auction and silentauction for the past fiveyears, offered for sale aselection of perennialplants grown from seed.These were selected by the

well known British gardenerand author, Beth Chatto.Her perennials included

Bupleunun falcatum, notedfor its green coloring; Cam-panula Lactiflora with splen-did powder-blue, bell-shaped flowers; the Welshpoppy, with single flowers ofclear vivid lemon; and Plan-tago rosularis. reminiscent ofa green zinnia.

Director Peter Ashton in-troduced the afternoon’sauction. Managing Horticul-turist Gary Koller andpropagators John Alexan-der and Peter Del Tredici de-scribed and auctioned therare and unusual plants. ATsuga canadensis ’Minuta’was auctioned for $410, anAcer tn, f lorum for $340, anda dwarf Rhododendron mu-

crortulatum for $250.Plant sales, gift shop, and

membership grossed over$16,500. The auctiongrossed $18,000.

A SPECIAL THANKS TO THEARBORETUM ASSOCIATES

Esther Ames, Mary Ashton,Caroline Blake, JaneBrown, Lizanne Chapin,Louise Cies, Diane Dalton,Arabella Dane, Sue Deland,Corliss Engle, Al Fordham,Karen Gallagher, LuisaHunnewell, Ellen McFar-land, Elise Sigal, Gerry Spil-lane, Ellen Stone, Mary AnnStreeter, Ann Taylor, PollyWakefield, Kathleen War-ren, Ruth West, ThelassaHencken, Joan Poser, LilyRice, and Mary Wolcott.

a

We Couldn’t Do It Without the Docents!

Although the Arboretum isarranged for scientific studyand research, it also servesas a horticultural and edu-cational resource for the

public. Docents, the welltrained volunteer guides,are a large factor in the suc-cess of the public outreach.

Last year, 48 docents pro-vided guided tours for morethan 100 groups, includinggarden clu~s, college botanyclasses, visiting dignitaries,groups from other muse-ums, travel writers, senior-citizen groups, and the gen-eral public.The docents introduce

scheduled groups to theriches of the Arboretumthrough typical tours of thegrounds or special, or

"theme," tours. These tours,which include, among manyothers, an introduction tothe Olmsted design and theconifer, dwarf-conifer, bon-

sai, and maple collections.For new guides, the Arbo-

retum offers a Docent Certifi-cation Program in the falland spring. This is describedin the course brochure.The Program’s core cur-

riculum includes courses onthe Arboretum’s history,trees, plant hunters, andmanagement. Certificationrequires two additional, elec-tive courses. The fee for thecourse curriculum is $25,and a reduced "docent" feeis available for all electivecourses.Docents attend year-

round monthly educationalmeetings and are encour-

aged to take additional train-ing, which leads to advancedcertification. To become partof this program vital to theArboretum, contact JeanneChristianson, VolunteerCoordinator, at (617) 524-1718.

OUR SPECIAL THANKS TO LAST YEAR’S DOCENTSDoris Ahearn Tom Coulson Alice Hosack Anne Marie OlsonP’rancis Ahearn Carin Dohlman Anne Joseph Jane Paquet-WhalJan Brink Margarita Drozdoff Adele Kern C. J. PattersonDick Brooks Barbara Emenenu Keith Kurman Paultne PerkinsAt Bussewitz Robert Franks Mary Jeart Langevin Robert ReedChert Campbell Jim Gorman Susan Laws Bob SiegelKate Cardamone Ruth Gri,(j~in Kit Lee John SullivanJoe Chevarley AI Haskell Chris McArdle Ltz ThompsonRichard Clark Kris Hewes Cornelia McMurtrie Anne WallaceJoan Collier Elizabeth Holmberg ~ncent O’Gorman Rich Warren

Roberta Zinman

XIV InternationalBotanical

CongressThree members of the Arbore-tum’s faculty and staffdelivered papers at the XIVInternational Botanical Con-

gress, which was held in

August in Berlin, Germany.They were:Peter S. Ashton and P. Hall-Patterns of Species Rich-ness in Mixed TropicalForests

R. B. Primack, Peter Ashton,and P. Hall- Maintenanceof Rare Tree Species inthe Dipterocarp Rain For-ests of Borneo

David C. Michener- Struc-ture and Distribution ofSecretory Cavities in

Leucophyllum (Scrophu-lariaceae)

N. K. B. Robson and Peter F.Stevens- Toward a Phylo-genetic Understanding ofthe Bonnetiaceae-Clusi-aceae-Hypericaceae

Peter F. Stevens- Nature,Law, and Classification:The Genesis of the Botani-cal Natural System, 1760-1860.

"IN A MASTER’S HANDS": IKEBANA DELIGHTS BOSTONIANS

Continuing its salute to

Japan’s horticultural treas-ures and traditions, whichbegan in May with the re-dedication of the newlyrenovated bonsai house, theArnold Arboretum spon-sored a special program inNovember on the Japanesehorticultural art known asikebana. On November 5, incosponsorship with the

Japan Society of Boston,the Arboretum brought Pro-fessor Kazuhiko Kudo fromTokyo to demonstrate theart of ikebana- "living flow-

ers"- the generic term forJapanese flower arranging.Gathering plant materials atthe Arboretum and flowermarkets beforehand, Profes-sor Kudo demonstrated ike-bana for two hours in theballroom of Boston’s FourSeasons Hotel as threehundred fifty delighted ob-servers looked on.A graduate of the Peking

Engineering School, Profes-sor Kudo is a Grand Masterof the Ohara School of Ike-bana. He began his studies ofikebana thirty-five years ago

under his mother, the lateMrs. Keon Kudo. GrandMaster Kudo has conductedworkshops, demonstrations,and exhibits of ikebana inChina, Australia, and SouthAmerica; this was his firstvisit to the United States. Hetravelled to Boston by way ofLos Angeles and was sched-uled to present similar dem-onstrations in Chicago andHonolulu.The Ohara School was

founded in the 1897 by Un-

MASTER KUDO, continued on page 4

3

March OffersBotanical Tourof Southern

Florida

Join Dr. Richard A. Howardon a botanical tour of south-ern Florida, March 23through March 29. Thetropical landscapes and gar-dens on this tour provide apleasant contrast to the NewEngland flora, and an intro-duction to both native andexotic plants.Participants will visit the

Fairchild Tropical Garden, ascientific botanical gardenwhose palm and cycad col-lections are of note, theMontgomery Foundation’sresearch facilities, the Jen-nings Estate, with its inter-esting ornamentals, and theSubtropical HorticulturalResearch Station of the

Through the courtesy of thepresent owner, a visit hasbeen arranged to the Kam-pong, where David Fairchildwrote The World Was MyGarden. Group members willalso tour Vizcaya, the estateof the late James Deering,with its ten acres of land-scaped grounds, formal gar-dens, and pools, explore theEverglades National Park,and spend a day visiting aclassic limestone sinkholeand hammock and a demon-stration planting of tropicalfruit-, nut-, and spice-pro-ducing plants.MARCH 23 TO MARCH 29, 1988

$1,095 per person (plus Arbo-retum Association member-ship fee and airfare)Leader: Richard A. How-ard, Professor of Dendrol-ogy, Harvard University.For reservations, call or writeEducation Registrar, Arnold

Jamaica Plain,Arboretum, Jamaica Plain,MA 02130, (617) 524-1718.

1

Arboretum Volunteer Coor-dinates Perennial Favorite

When Al Haskell retired from36 years with Procter &Gamble, he didn’t reckon hisvolunteer association withthe Arboretum would be aday-and-night assignment.But he found coordinatingthe Arnold Arboretum andthe New York BotanicalGarden’s two-day sympo-sium at Harvard Universitytook two months of more-than-full-time caretaking.Because of his managerialacumen and artistry, how-ever, the symposium came tofull bloom successfully.

Al’s wife, LaVerna ("L.V."),was already a volunteer atthe Arboretum when hejoined her here a year and ahalf ago upon his retirement.Avid amateur gardeners,they live in Cohasset, Massa-chusetts, where they raiseherbs, vegetables, and smallfruit to nourish their otherhobbies- cooking and can-ning. After training in theDocent Program, Al has ledspecial tours of the Arbo-retum’s grounds. Whenasked about his favoriteArboretum site, he said, "Ithink the oaks up on BusseyHill are really something tosee in the springtime. Whenthe sun shines throughthe grove and the flowersare cascading down thebranches, it’s breathtaking."

"

Early last summer,Jeanne Christianson, Vol-unteer Coordinator, and NanBlake Sinton, Director ofPublic Programs, who over-saw the symposium, askedAl if he’d accept a new as-signment- the coordination

CORRECTIONMrs. Melville Chapin was incor-rectly identified as Barbara Ep-stein in the photograph on Page 1of the Summer issue of News. We

apolo~ize to both of these faithfulFriends for our error!

of the symposium on peren-nials and flowering shrubson October 16-17. He wouldbe responsible for all thedetails of transportation,housing, lecture facilities,seating, and feeding thespeakers and 900 regis-trants. He went about hisdifficult assignment withequanimity, recognizing, hesaid, "I needed to handle it allin a way so people would sayeverything went so well thatit must have been a simpleproject." In fact, that is whatspeakers and participantsdid say, because thesymposium’s productionwent so smoothly.

"The symposium is an

elaborate undertaking," saidExecutive Director LydiaKowalski. "Having such awonderful volunteer takecharge was the vital ingredi-ent in the success of thisprogram."

"

"Landscaping with Peren-nials" was the topic for thefirst day. Speakers includedMarco Polo Stufano, Directorof Horticulture at Wave Hill,The Bronx; J. Kenneth Bur-ras, Superintendent of theUniversity Botanic Garden,Oxford, England; garden-design author Jane Brown;Elsa Bakalar of the HillsideGardener; and Kurt Blue-mel, President of Kurt Blue-mel, Inc.The Saturday session on

"Landscaping with Flower-ing Shrubs" featured JohnBond, Keeper of the Gardensat Windsor Great Park;French gardening writerAnita Pereire; Peter DelTredici, Assistant Propaga-tor at the Arboretum;Carolyn Marsh Lindsay,President of the AmericanHorticultural Society, andRoy Klehm of Charles Klehm& Son Nursery.

4

Borneo Trip Was aBotanical Tour de Force

This summer, 22 Friends of both the Arboretum and theMuseum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) followed tour leadersPeter S. Ashton of the Arboretum, Milan G. Bull of the Con-necticut Audubon Society, and John D. Constable of the MCZon a two-week tour of Borneo, the third-largest island in theworld and one of the last unspoiled places on Earth.The group’s first important stop was Borneo’s Mount Kina-

balu, a treasure of fauna and flora. Ve~etation zones onKinabalu’s slopes range from lowland jungle to montane oak,conifer forests, and dwarf rhododendron thickets.Willard Hunnewell, a rhododendron aficionado, said Borneoproved a botanical wonderland. "But," he said, "the highlightof the trip was Peter Ashton’s talks on tropical forests.""It was a fabulous trip," agreed another participant, Sally

Cheffy. Cheffy, one of the group’s determined hikers led byMary Ashton, climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu (14,455feet). She found the changing vegetation intriguing as shehiked in the early morning hours to view a spectacular sunrise.Kinabalu is one of the richest floral areas in the world.From Mount Kinabalu, the tour went to the Sepilok Orangu-

tan Sanctuary, whose objective is to reintroduce captured ororphaned orangutans into the wild; Gaya Island, with its 13miles of graded nature trails and a large number of birds,including the megapode, white-bellied sea eagle, and piedhombill ; the Niah Caves, Borneo’s archeological treasure; andBako National Park. The coastline of this park has seven ma-jor vegetation types typical of Sarawak: mangrove forest,sandy-beach forest, sandstone-cliff vegetation, alluvial forest,peat-swamp forest, lowland dipterocarp forest, and kerangas(heath) forest.

Arboretum’s Summer WorkshopPropagates Science Knowledge

Two years ago science-ori-ented,museums in Boston,including the Arnold Arbore-tum, formed the MuseumInstitute for Teaching Sci-ence (MITS). This consor-

tium designed summer pro-grams to give elementaryteachers information, skills,and projects that the teach-ers could duplicate for theirpupils in the classroom.During three weeks in July

this summer, 107 elemen-tary teachers began theMITS program with a four-day orientation session atthe Museum of Science.Then, teachers were dividedinto groups of 15, and eachgroup spent the next eight

days at one museum for aseries of workshops.At the Arboretum, Diane

Syverson, Children’s Pro-

gram Coordinator, led teach-ers through many hands-onactivities designed to rein-force the scientific-inquirymethod. In one activity,teachers hammered chloro-phyll out of leaves onto cloth.following a lesson on photo-synthesis ; in another, theywatched the grounds crewcut down a tree and used thetree in a lesson on how paperis made from trees.Arboretum guest speakers

included Gary Koller, Man-aging Horticulturist; PeterDel Tredici, Assistant Plant

MASTER KUDO.continued Jrom page 2

shin Ohara. Its style is moresubtle and sympathetic tonature than the "twisted andtortured" method of classicalikebana. There are two basicforms- Moribana, whichemploys flat, shallow con-tainers, and Heiko, whichuses tall, thin ones.Assisting Master Kudo

were Mr. Masahiro Goto andMr. Masatoshi Tomita.

Propagator; and Ida Hay,Curatorial Associate, as wellas Dr. Holly Bedell of theHarvard University Her-baria.Dr. Bedell lectured on the

cellular make-up of a cross-section of a tree. "It’s some-thing that’s really dry in atextbook, but comes alivewhen you hear Holly de-scribe it," Syverson said.After the Arboretum’s in-

tensive workshop, teachersparticipated in one-daymini-workshops at the othermuseums, which includedthe Children’s Museum, theNew England Aquarium, theStoneham Zoo, the Massa-chusetts Audubon Society,and the Museum of Com-parative Zoology at Harvard.The MITS program is spon-

sored by grants from the Na-tional Science Foundationand the U. S. Department ofEducation.During the year, the Arbo-

retum offers Field Studies forthird- through sixth-gradeclasses. These are Plants inAutumn: Seeds and Leaves;Hemtock HiLI; Around theWorld with Trees; and Flow-ers. The Field Studies weredesigned to meet specificscience-curriculum objec-tives, create an outdoorlearning experience with theArnold Arboretum as class-room, and integrate skills inreading, writing, mathemat-ics, art, and poetry in aninterdisciplinary approachto teaching science.