From Plant Press, Vol. 1, No. 1-2, March 1998.
By Deborah Hinrichs
Toe-tapping bluegrass music spills into the hallway from Warren Wagner’s office on the fifth floor of the Museum of Natural History on a mid-January day. As the Curator of Pacific Botany points to the 50 or so CDs next to his stereo, he says that he has about 1,500 albums and almost a thousand CDs in his collection. “The exploration of patterns, finding that one kind of music influences another, exploring different artists, and different types of music,” Wagner said, is part of what drives him to collect music. His fascination with figuring out patterns in music is a short leap from the driving force behind his interest in taxonomy — understanding patterns in plants.
He joined the Botany Department in 1988 just after completing the two volume book, Manual of the Flowering Plants of Hawaii, that he co-authored while a botanist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. “I was hired here to do Pacific Island research and since I had just finished doing that book, I was exploding outward with all these ideas of projects to do. I spent my first four years here starting a million projects,” he said.
Wagner is just now getting back to some of those projects. After four years at the Museum’s Botany Department, he was appointed chair, a position he held for five years and completed in December 1997. “I’m enjoying immensely refocusing on things. I know exactly the things I want to do,” said Wagner about leaving his position as chair. “One thing I noticed, and actually anticipated in a much greater way, was when the day finally came when it was finished. A lot of people say that after reaching milestones like that you get depressed and you wander around. There was maybe a tiny bit of that for like 10 minutes, but really I never experienced that this time,” Wagner said. “There was an explosion of things to do. That feels very good, because there were all these things that I was trying to focus on while I was chair. Diddling around with things doesn’t feel very satisfying because you don’t make much progress and you don’t finish it. And you often don’t do it to the level of refinement that you would like to see when you’re doing so many things,” he said. The lively tempo of the music playing in his office is reminiscent of the pace with which Wagner is still generating new research projects on Hawaii and the Pacific Islands.
Despite his obvious pleasure in getting back to full-time research, Wagner will miss a few things about the position. “Who knows how I’ll feel a year or two from now, but the thing that I have noticed the most is that I no longer have my finger in a whole lot of things. I do miss knowing what’s going on and not being involved,” he said. “I found it most interesting to work with many different people in the department and in the museum on a wide diversity of initiatives.”
Wagner’s description of his research as an explosion of projects turns out to be accurate. The long list of his current research projects ranges from floras to a biogeography project to detailed studies of the taxomony, classification, and evolution of groups of plants. His flora work, only one of the six or seven areas of research he mentioned, demonstrates the levels of involvement Wagner has in the field of Pacific botany. Currently, he has several floras in the works, including a new edition of the flora of Hawaii. “There’s been an explosion of information— about 200 new weed species that we didn’t know about, and about 60 additional native species, about half of which weren’t discovered when we published in 1990,” Wagner said. “What we want to do is update the information that was there on the flowering plants and add the new weeds and new native species.”
The other two floras continue work done by curators before him. The person he replaced (Marie-Hélène Sachet) had been working on plants from the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia. Wagner paired up with David Lorence, a researcher in Hawaii, when he first started at the Natural History Museum, to compile a book somewhat like the Flora of Hawaii on the Marquesas. “So far, very few collections have ever been made there, and there is alot of unprocessed material, so we are taking our sweet time doing that project,” Wagner said.
The other flora project was started by Ray Fosberg, whom Wagner calls “one of the grandads or fathers of Pacific botany,” who worked in Micronesia. “Therefore, we have a wonderful Micronesia collection that he had been amassing for 50 years,” Wagner said. “Since we have the great collections, we’re also gearing up to do a book on Micronesia but we’re starting with a Web site that has his published checklist on it.”
Balancing all of his projects is an art form that Wagner is working on. “I try to limit myself. There are hundreds of projects that I’ve been jettisoning recently because I am doing too much,” he said. “I seem to be attracted to doing a lot of different things. I like very much having the hands on, working on the floras and the biosystematics and biogeography. There are so many things to do as I’ve sort of illustrated,” Wagner said with a chuckle.
His interest, it turns out, goes beyond seeing patterns and includes piecing people together to broaden a project. “Part of my interest is the interaction with all the other scientists and people who are doing the work, many of whom have attributes and abilities that I don’t,” Wagner said. “The end product, by trying to facilitate and orchestrate, is certainly better than little old me can do. To me, the ideal environment is to interact with a lot of people.”
Wagner, who views himself as a younger generation traditionalist in the field of taxonomy, knows that there are fewer people trained in the same way he was. Perhaps, if he could just figure out a way to take his fascination with plants and put it to music he could attract students to the field. Then, he would have assistants to help complete and eventually take over “the Warren Wagner lifetime list of taxonomic projects.” Since his musical collection includes everything from African and Cajun to bluegrass and country, the number of people who would find his list of projects compelling would no doubt be numerous.
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