From Plant Press, Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1999.
Dr. Egbert H. Walker, a Department of Botany staff member for 30 years beginning in 1928, will be honored in an exhibit planned for spring 2000 in Okinawa, sponsored by the “A Retrospect of Okinawan Scenes” steering committee of the Okinawa Prefectural Government and Ryukyu Shimpo Newspaper Co., Ltd. Dr. Tetsuo Koyama, Director of the Museum of Bioresource Sciences, Nihon University, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan is the researcher.
Filming in conjunction with the project took place in the department, NMNH and SI Archives in May 1999. A small reception was held in the Castle, where the former Governor of Okinawa, Dr. Hiroko Sho, presented a letter to Secretary Heyman thanking him for the Smithsonian’s assistance in making Dr. Walker’s slides and archives available. Also in attendance were the initiator of the project, Mr. Katsuo Nakamoto, president of Nakazen Herbal Medicine Co.; Mr. Tomohiko Tamaki, director of Okinawa Cable Network TV; Mrs. Jeanne Houghton, Dr. Walker’s daughter; and Dan Nicolson and Deborah Bell representing the Department of Botany.
During World War II, Dr. Walker was in charge of the Serviceman’s Collecting Program, and collected over 7,000 plants in the Okinawa area himself. Responses from personnel in the services came from various areas, but in particular from botanists in the army of occupation in Okinawa. This led to Walker’s publications on Important Trees of the Ryukyu Islands (1954) and the Flora of Okinawa and the Southern Ryukyu Islands (1976). His 300+ kodachrome slides have retained good color quality, and are of particular interest to the exhibit committee as they represent perhaps the only color slides of Okinawa taken in 1951.
Several years ago a former serviceman called from the visitor’s desk in NMNH inquiring about specimens he had collected in Okinawa. We found the accession documentation through the Donor File in the Office of the Registrar, and to my delight, it contained a list of determinations by Egbert Walker. I don’t know who was happier about finding the collections mounted and filed in the herbarium, the donor or me! There is an appropriate quote by Dr. F. Ray Fosberg in an obituary of Dr. Walker (Taxon 41: 618-620. 1992): “Any perceptive botanist who works extensively in the general Old World collections in the U.S. National Herbarium can scarcely fail to appreciate the prevailing good order and evidence of care he finds there, largely the work of Egbert Walker over many years.”
[by Deborah Bell]
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