From Plant Press, Vol. 7, No. 1 from January 2004.
By Dan H. Nicolson
(From Taxon 52:867. 2003)
“Bob” Read was born 13 December 1931 in Woodbury, New Jersey. He served in the U.S. Navy Reserve (1951‑1953) and the Air Force Reserve (1953‑1957). He graduated from the University of Miami (B.Sc. 1958), CornellUniversity (M.Sc. 1961, working with Harold E. Moore, Jr.) and the University of the West Indies (Ph.D. 1968). He was a botanist at the FairchildTropicalGarden in Miami (1960‑1965, working with C. Dennis Adams, with a thesis on Jamaican Thrinax). The latter became a revision of the genus published in 1975 as the Smithsonian Contributions to Botany vol. 19.
While in school at Miami, Florida, Read volunteered at the Fairchild Botanic Garden in Miami, and, after graduating from Cornell, he became the Garden’s first botanist. In 1967 he won a National Academy of Science Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on Bromeliaceae with Lyman Smith at the U.S. National Herbarium. He was field chief for M.D. Dassanyake and F.R. Fosberg’s (eds.) Revised Handbook to the Flora of Ceylon project (1969‑1970). He returned to Washington to become an editor for the Index Nominum Genericorum (1970‑1972), and then an editor for the North American Flora project (1972‑1973). In 1973 he became an associate curator at the Smithsonian, later a curator until his retirement in 1989 to Florida. He continued research on palms and bromeliads and renewed a position with the Fairchild Tropical Garden. During his retirement in Florida he was the Founding Chairman of what is now the Naples Botanical Garden and supported many other organizations valuing his botanical expertise and enthusiasm.
His research interests particularly focused on the systematic botany of recalcitrant and often poorly collected tropical palms, bromeliads, cycads and orchids. He began publishing (on palms) in 1959. He contributed palms and part of Bromeliaceae to C.D. Adams’ Flowering Plants of Jamaica (1972), as well as the palms in R.E. Howard’s Flora of the Lesser Antilles (1979). His last major publication (2001) was Nehrling’s Plants, People, and Places in Early Florida based on and updating the publications and manuscripts of Henry Nehrling (1853-1929).
He died of congestive heart failure 15 July 2003 in Naples, Florida, after some months of ill health.
Comments