The Plant Press

Observing the 100th Anniversary of Armistice Day: the Common Poppy

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

November 11, 2018, is Veteran’s Day and the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day. Armistice Day is commemorated to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany for the end of fighting on the Western Front of World War I. The armistice took effect in 1918 at eleven o'clock in the morning—the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.” Veteran’s Day, the official United States public holiday to honor military veterans, coincides with Armistice Day and Remembrance Day (also known as Poppy Day), a memorial day observed by the British Commonwealth of Nations member states to remember the members of the armed forces who have died in the line of duty.

Papaver rhoeas (photo by Gary Houston [CC0], from Wikimedia Commons)

The common poppy, Papaver rhoeas, is worn in many countries on Armistice Day in order to commemorate those who lost their lives during warfare. The poppy became the symbol of remembrance soon after the publication of “In Flanders Fields,” a war poem written by Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. The poem gives reference to the red poppies that grew over the graves of fallen soldiers:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Papaver rhoeas, an annual herbaceous species in the Papaveraceae, has a long-lived soil seed bank that readily germinates in disturbed soils. The plant was readily observed blooming on the battlefields during the war. The species is believed to be native to southern Europe, North Africa, and temperate Asia, but has become naturalized outside of this range.

A specimen of Papaver rhoeas collected in 1910 by Herman Knoche in Montpellier, France.

The U.S. National Herbarium has databased nine specimens of Papaver rhoeas from its collections. These specimens range from Lebanon and Iraq to Spain and the Canary Islands, and they date from the 1890s to the 1970s. The specimen shown here was collected on 19 May 1910 by American botanist Herman Knoche in Montpellier, France.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

Alex White

Alex White is a post-doctoral fellow with a joint appointment in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the Data Science Lab in the Smithsonian Office of Information. White is working with Laurence Dorr and Eric Schuettpelz at NMNH and Rebecca Dikow in the Data Science Lab on developing machine learning models for evaluating global scale patterns of trait diversity in digitized herbarium collections. White recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago where he studied the ecological and evolutionary drivers of Himalayan bird diversity gradients with a particular focus on biogeography. His research broadly concerns developing computational methods for combining local community data with macroscale data to evaluate contemporary and historical limits on diversity.

Honors & Awards

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

Marcelo Pace and Andrew Rozefelds received an award in recognition of their recent paper describing the discovery of the first wood fossil of Vitaceae in the Southern Hemisphere. The Journal of Systematics and Evolution presents awards annually to recognize the papers published in JSE with important impact in systematics and evolution. The paper “The first record of fossil Vitaceae wood from the Southern Hemisphere, a new combination for Vitaceoxylon ramunculiformis, and reappraisal of the fossil record of the grape family (Vitaceae) from the Cenozoic of Australia” <https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/jse.12300> has won the JSE Outstanding Papers award.

External appearance of the permineralized stem of the fossil Austrovideira dettmannae. Note tessellate bark with vertically oriented fissures, similar to modern grape vines.

Thomas H. Hollowell (2 Sept 1954 – 25 Sept 2018)

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

In 1995 the Biological Diversity of the Guiana Shield (BDG) Program was in need of a new database manager. Judy Skog, then a Professor at George Mason University, recommended one of her students, Tom Hollowell, as a smart and capable person to take on the job. We hired him and we were quite surprised. Not only was he smart and talented at working with databases, he was also funny and optimistic; he loved music, environmental conservation, political activism, riding his bicycle to work, and of course, his family and friends.

Tom Hollowell at the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) meeting in Berlin, Germany (2016)

Tom was the BDG data manager from 1996 to 2005, responsible for a database of over 150,000 records, producing labels for incoming collections and exchange, and updating the database as identifications arrived. He also coordinated students and volunteers working with the BDG Program databasing and barcoding plant specimens at the U.S. National Herbarium that had been collected in the Guiana Shield region. Tom had a strong sense of teamwork and was always there to help find solutions to any problems. He never shied away from assisting staff and researchers with data inquiries or with troubleshooting programs such as ArcMap, Access, or EMu.

Tom Hollowell at Shell Beach, Guyana (2001).

As the Program expanded to include the animals of the Guiana Shield, Tom was instrumental in coordinating researchers from different disciplines and departments to produce the various BDG publications and projects. While working full-time Tom went back to college at night to pursue a Doctoral degree in Environmental Science and Public Policy at George Mason University, receiving his PhD in 2005. As part of his dissertation research Tom studied fire-disturbed mangrove ecosystems in the Shell Beach area of Guyana.

During his time with the Program Tom co-authored many of the BDG publications. We would have kept him forever, but he left for a good cause: becoming a key player in NMNH’s Office of Informatics Technology, helping make the museum’s new database systems function. Before he left he trained and mentored his replacement, Sara Alexander (BDG 2006-2012; now with ITIS). Although he moved up a floor he never lost his connection to Botany, and stopped by frequently… especially when we had food!