From Plant Press, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 1999.
By Robert DeFilipps
Dan Henry Nicolson is one of the world’s foremost “plant correctors”. While studying the true identity of an aroid from the insular periphery of Asia, the “Telinga potato” which was known for over a hundred years as Amorphophallus campanulatus, he unhesitatingly corrected its name to A. paeoniifolius. He also rescued, from a maze of generic uncertainty, one of the most well-known of all houseplants, the variegated “pothos”, and designated it as the cultivar Epipremnum pinnatum ‘Aureum’. In fact, if it were possible to do so, this avid family genealogist would correct his own birthplace from the actual locus of Kansas City, Missouri, to the more affectionate town of Shenandoah, Iowa where he grew up, but that’s another story.
The seeds of a nascent interest in botany surrounded him as a youth, for his family owned several seed and nursery companies in the Midwest, and his first educational venture was business school, in order to absorb techniques for involvement in the family’s concerns. While enrolled in business school (MBA, Stanford University, 1957), a desire for botany which had originally surfaced at Grinnell College (AB, 1955) began to proliferate as various collections of cultivated plants were made, and culminated in a master’s degree (1959) and doctorate (1964) from Cornell University. He joined the Department of Botany in the National Museum of Natural History in 1964, and his doctoral thesis, a revision of the Asiatic aroid genus Aglaonema, which includes the popular “Chinese evergreen” of horticulture, became the very first listing under the new series entitled Smithsonian Contributions to Botany (1969). Fast-forwarding to three decades beyond 1969, he was recently appointed by Chairman W. J. Kress to the position of managing editorship of the Smithsonian Contributions to Botany. With approximately 200 publications (including three books) under his belt, Nicolson’s advice on botanical nomenclature is widely sought by an international clientele, and perhaps acknowledged in more taxonomic articles than that of almost any of his contemporaries.
Nicolson spent his honeymoon in 1959 at the International Botanical Congress in Montreal, Canada, and since the mid-1950s his career has always included a generous amount of devotion to the activities of worldwide botanical organizations. He served the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT) as an officer on numerous committees (e.g., Spermatophyta; Typification of Generic Names; Orthography; Bureau of Nomenclature; Awards; Nominations; Editorial Committee of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature), and as nomenclature editor of the journal Taxon from 1979 to date. He was IAPT vice-president from 1985-1993, and is now in the last year of a six-year term as president of the IAPT, which began in 1993 when he was elected prior to the Tokyo Congress. In addition to those impeccable credentials, he has been intimately involved with the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the Botanical Society of Washington, and the Flora Malesiana Foundation, and is a founding member of the International Aroid Society and the AETFAT (Association pour l’Etude Taxonomique de la Flore d’Afrique Tropicale).
Sessions of intensive field work in Southeast Asia (17 months); Nepal (1 year); Yunnan, China (3 months); Sri Lanka (1 month); India; Dominica (West Indies), and elsewhere paved the way for substantial publications with reference to the Flora of the Hassan District, Karnataka (India); Rheede’s (1669-1698) Hortus Malabaricus; and the Flora of Dominica: Dicotyledoneae. Currently, Nicolson is completing a major project, initiated by Dr. F. Raymond Fosberg, documenting the publications and collections of the Forsters, a father-and-son team who accompanied the second voyage of Captain Cook, and whose work became a cornerstone of Pacific botany. Additionally, he intends to take a shot at preparing a revision of the Indomalaysian genus Anadendrum Schott, for publication in the venerable Flora Malesiana.
This year is already a very busy one for Nicolson, who is one of the ten members of the Steering Committee for the 1999 International Botanical Congress to be held in August in St. Louis, Missouri. A new set of rules and recommendations, the “St. Louis Code” of botanical nomenclature, will arise from the deliberations of the participants. Being the adroit master of technicalities that he is, Nicolson seemed disinclined to register any speculations about the ultimate fate of the major issues before the Congress, and in deference to his office I refrained from asking.
In a curious twist of fate, as the unofficial necrologist of the department, sooner or later the meticulous talents of Dr. Nicolson may be summoned to prepare the last written statements concerning the careers of some of us who at this moment are reading the details of his accomplishments.