From Plant Press, Vol. 5, No. 1 from January 2002.
On 8 December the Centennial of the Botanical Society of Washington (BSW) was celebrated with a symposium “A Capital View of Botany: Our Changing D.C. Flora” at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. The symposium organizing committee included Dan Nicolson, Gene Rosenberg, Robert Soreng and Alice Tangerini. Speakers included Stanwyn Shetler and Paul Peterson.
Shetler addressed the changes in the local vascular plant flora, emphasizing that some species are increasingly rare, such as native Celastrus scandens,and may be lost while other species, such as Chinese Celastrus orbiculatus, have exploded in the last 50 years. Peterson discussed how flowering time records document a north temperate warming trend over the last 50 years, resulting in a week longer growing season. The keynote speaker was paleobotanist Leo Hickey (formerly of Botany, now at Yale) who spoke on “Time’s Green Arrow: The Evolution of Washington’s Flora,” a review of the documentation of early angiosperm evolution in the Cretaceous Potomac Formation.
Former presidents of BSW include past and current members of Botany: Fredrick A. Coville (1902), Alfred S. Hitchcock (1916), Egbert H. Walker (1950), Albert C. Smith (1962), William L. Stern (1972), Richard H. Eyde (1973), Robert W. Read (1975), Laurence E. Skog (1977), Richard S. Cowan (1979), Stanwyn G. Shetler (1983), Robert B. Faden (1985), Dan H. Nicolson (1990), Deborah A. Bell (1992), Dieter C. Wasshausen (1997), Gene Rosenberg (1998), Harold E. Robinson (1999), and Paul M. Peterson (2000).
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