From Plant Press, Vol. 5, No. 4 from October 2002.
By Robert DeFilipps
Justicia is an attractive genus in the dicot family Acanthaceae. It is named for James Justice (1698-1763), an early tulipomaniac and the first person in England to grow a pineapple to the fruiting stage. All botanists and horticulturists, and numerous other visitors to the tropics, are familiar with the “shrimp plant,” an evergreen shrub with arching spikes having conspicuous, coppery bronze, overlapping bracts resembling the carapace of a large shrimp. The technical name of this widely cultivated plant, once endemic to Mexico, is Justicia brandegeana Wasshausen & L.B. Smith. The joint authors of the species, Dieter C. Wasshausen (Acanthaceae and Begoniaceae specialist) and Lyman B. Smith (Bromeliaceae and Begoniaceae specialist, deceased) have remained associated in a number of ways by mutual botanical interests over the years.
Dieter Carl Wasshausen, curator in the United States National Herbarium (US), was born in Jena, Germany in 1938. After the Second World War, his father, an eminent German rocket scientist, settled the family in New Jersey. Later, Dieter Wasshausen joined the U.S. Army to spend six months in Greenland testing the rate of movement of nuclear fallout radiation on the Greenland Icecap. His three degrees were earned at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity (Washington, D.C.): B.S. in 1962; M.S. in 1965 with a thesis on Acanthaceae for C.L. Lundell’s Flora of Texas; and Ph. D. in 1972 with a dissertation monograph of the genus Aphelandra (Acanthaceae). The major advisor for his degrees was Lyman Smith, curator in the Smithsonian Institution’s Department of Botany.
Wasshausen began working in Smithsonian Botany on May 20, 1962, as a technician with Velva Rudd, the Fabaceae expert. In a span of 14 years, he worked upwards from technician to the position of Chairman of the Botany Department, which he assumed in 1976 and held until 1982. Prior to that he had been an associate curator from 1969 to 1976, and later became a full curator from 1982 to the present time. A great affinity for field collecting and exploration pervades his botanical interests, and one early influence was his opportunity to peruse the vast collections that had recently been brought back from Amazonian Peru by J.J. Wurdack. At nearly the same time it was realized that Emery C. Leonard (1892-1968), an Acanthaceae specialist at the Smithsonian, had abruptly left behind eight herbarium cases of Texas Acanthaceae, and Lyman Smith suggested that Wasshausen might want to examine them. This led to his master’s study as a treatment for Lundell’s Flora of Texas, and was the genesis of a lifelong interest in the New World Acanthaceae.
In the 1980s he diverged slightly to collaborate with L.B. Smith and R.M. Klein in a study of the taxonomically difficult grass family (Poaceae) for the Flora Ilustrada Catarinense, a flora of the state of Santa Catarina, Brazil, resulting in 998 pages of text. Wasshausen’s excursions into the taxonomy of begonias (Begoniaceae) also began with the stimulus of Smith, and their first joint paper on the subject was on begonias in Ecuador (1979), followed by a treatment for the Flora of Ecuador in 1987. In addition to those previously mentioned, Wasshausen has contributed family taxonomic treatments of Acanthaceae for the flora of Texas by Correll & Johnston, and of the Galapagos Islands, Dominica, Pico das Almas (Bahia, Brazil) and Venezuelan Guayana, as well as for checklists or catalogues of the family in the three Guianas (Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana), French Guiana (edited by Cremers & Hoff), and Peru.
Among his numerous begonia publications is a treatment of the family for the Flora of Venezuela (1989), and the world-scope treatment in the definitive Begoniaceae, Edition 2, Part I: Annotated Species List; Part II: Illustrated Key, Abridgement and Supplement, by J. Golding and D.C. Wasshausen, which recently appeared in Contrib. U.S. Nat. Herb. 43: 1-289 (2002); its precursor (ed. 1) appeared in Smithsonian Contrib. Bot. 60: 1-584 (1986), of which Wasshausen was a co-author with L.B. Smith, J. Golding and C.E. Karegeannes.
Altogether, Wasshausen has described approximately 247 new species in various families, and five new species have been named for him, including the composite Vernonia wasshausenii S.B. Jones from Brazil; the melastome Tibouchina wasshausenii J.J. Wurdack from Peru; and Vellozia wasshausenii L.B. Smith & E.S. Ayensu from Brazil. Many of the new species in both categories have been collected during his strenuous field work of the past decades. In addition to work in Texas, he has collected in an astonishing array of places: Puerto Rico; Dominica; Trinidad (Mt. Aripo); Tobago; Brazil (states of Goias, Minas Gerais); Peru’s Cordillera Vilcabamba, Rio Urubamba, Tambopata Valley and other Amazonian areas; the Bahamas (Abaco, Exuma, Rum Cay, San Salvador); French Guiana; Queensland, Australia; Bolivia (Chuquiasca, Santa Cruz, Cochabamba, La Paz); northern Argentina (Jujuy, Salta, Misiones); and two trips (1987, 1990) to observe and collect the endemics of Madagascar with the incomparable Werner Rauh (University of Heidelberg). Additionally, required library research has led him to visit foreign herbaria too numerous to mention.
In 1979, Wasshausen received the Willdenow Medal during the Tercentenary Celebration of the Botanic Garden, Berlin. It was awarded in recognition of his significant assistance in rebuilding the general collections of the Berlin Herbarium, which had been severely damaged during WWII. At present he has a number of projects going on simultaneously, and variously in press, such as treatments of the Acanthaceae for the Vascular Flora of the Southeastern United States and the Flora of the Guianas; a revision of Brazilian Begonia with Smith; comprehensive treatments of the acanths for the floras of Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia; and floristic studies of the Begoniaceae occurring in the Guianas, Brazil and Peru.
Although Wasshausen has covered so much territory and contributed greatly towards our understanding of the taxonomy and systematics of the Acanthaceae and Begoniaceae, he indicates that there still remains much to be investigated. We can make some mental extrapolations for ourselves based on his comments. He has noted, for example, that originally there were 120 species of acanth known from Bolivia, but after three field trips he was able to increase that number by one-fourth more, to around 160 species. Perhaps even more startling is his remark that during just three weeks collecting in the Apurimac region of Peru, he discovered 37 species of Acanthaceae new to science, just by walking and boating within a 25-mile radius: there, every valley has its own assemblage of acanth species. Detailed work on pollinators and pollen morphology are still desirable goals for future workers.
Currently as busy as ever, work has been finished on two chapters in the forthcoming Botany book on conservation of plant biodiversity being edited by W.J. Kress and G.A. Krupnick, and for a treatment of Acanthaceae in Scott Mori’s (NY) book on Flowering Plant Families of the American Tropics. For the next three years, Wasshausen’s projects will include writing species descriptions for a marvelous set of books depicting in color photographs the Acanthaceae and Begoniaceae of Brazil, to be published by the Brazilian Harri Lorenzi. In 2003, if all permissions are granted, he is planning a collecting trip to the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. A move to Southport, in coastal North Carolina, is also anticipated for this veteran botanist.
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