The Plant Press

Art by Alice Tangerini: Corytoplectus speciosus (Poepp.) Wiehler

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2022.

Corytoplectus speciosus is native to high-elevation cloud forests of northwestern South America and now in cultivation, grown for its colorful leaves and yellow and orange flowers. The plant was drawn by Alice Tangerini for the Gesneriaceae of the Flora of Peru project and published to illustrate the species in Rodríguez-Flores & Skog (Selbyana 29: 92-124; 2008). In drawing C. speciosus Tangerini used images from slides that were taken in the field. A pressed specimen (L.E. Skog, J.E. Skog, Lamas & Schunke 5168) was used for the flower, fruit, and seed details. The slide images provided valuable information on the leaf surfaces and patterns of coloration.

Awards & Honors

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2022.

The National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) presented the 2021 Peer Recognition Awards on January 20, 2022. Award recipients are individuals and teams who have given their time and talent to the museum above and beyond what their jobs call for, and to those who have done something that makes a difference in the outside community, for the museum, or for the larger Smithsonian community. The Peer Recognition Award Committee is composed of nine Museum staff members representing a cross-section of the entire museum community.

Seventeen awards were presented during the online Zoom ceremony, hosted by Kirk Johnson (Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History) and Bob Corrigan (Office of the Deputy Director). From the Department of Botany, Gary Krupnick was the proud recipient of the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Action Award.

The NMNH IDEA Council accepts their Peer Recognition Award

During 2021, the 22 members of the NMNH Council for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility (IDEA), which included Krupnick representing the Department of Botany, volunteered to do their part to improve work life for everyone in the NMNH community. The IDEA Council has taken a bold leadership stance in partnership with the Museum's leaders as their approach to change.

With the help of the Smithsonian Organization and Audience Research (SOAR), the Council conducted a survey to better understand perceptions of staff, contractors, affiliates, and volunteers about inclusivity, diversity, equity, and accessibility at NMNH. The findings enabled the Museum’s voices to guide the IDEA Council’s plans for improving culture and advancing IDEA in the Museum. The plan has become a model for excellence both at the Museum and across the Smithsonian by featuring realistic concrete goals, practical tactics, performance indicators, and critical success factors.

While the road ahead is neither straight nor certain, the IDEA Council has given us a very bright light to shine ahead of us and the confidence that we can walk that road together to a brighter—more inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible—future.

How two key figures brought cherry trees to the U.S.

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2022.

By Julia Beros.

As Spring begins to peak through the last dregs of winter and sweep away those straggler snowflakes, the delicate blossoms of cherry trees (Prunus × yedoensis) that cover the Washington D.C. area return to invite a rumination on life and the ephemeral while also recalling the origins of this celebration through a botanical and cultural lens. As many of the associated events with the National Cherry Blossom festival suggest, these diaphanous blooms are the signal of an ever-renewing friendship and cultural exchange between the United States and Japan, but are further imbued with a rich history of botanical exploration and inquisition that has roots with a young intern sent out to the Naples Zoological Station in Italy with support from the Smithsonian Institution in the late 1800s.

Likely photograph of Eliza Scidmore. The unlabeled image was found in a Lacquer box donated to the Smithsonian by Scidmore herself. Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, National Anthropological Archives, Image no. NHB2011-001881.

While Hanami, Sakura Matsuri, or Cherry Blossom Festivals are observed globally these days (with gifted plantings lining parks in major cities from Helsinki to Rome, New York, Macon, and Toronto) Washingtonians and tourists alike have been convening beneath the cherry blossoms here since the early 1900s to honor a Japanese tradition that goes back hundreds of years. After returning from a trip to Japan, travel writer, photographer, and notable member of the National Geographic Society Eliza Scidmore petitioned (persistently for 24 years) for plantings of Japanese cherry trees in the nation’s capital. Although the first batch of trees sent over was infamously burned due to a possible infestation of insects and nematodes (as the trees were choice specimens with long established roots and healthy buds that unfortunately housed long established pests), the following trees were carefully inspected and planted to line the Tidal Basin. While there is much discussion over the “semantics” of how these trees came-to-be and their symbolic designation, they are also an example of the horticultural ingenuity and curiosity of the times that fueled the general interest in expanding botanical horizons. The successful naturalization of these now iconic trees was facilitated by botanical explorer David Fairchild. 

As a young enterprising adventurer, Fairchild began his career on a Smithsonian Institution grant to a Naples Zoological Station. It was on this first voyage to Italy that he met Barbour Lathrop who took great interest in Fairchild and his potential in exploration, and subsequently underwrote and funded many of his future botanical trips. Acting as botanist, explorer, and occasionally spy, Fairchild is credited with introducing thousands of economically significant and (gastronomically appealing) crops that now seem commonplace: kale, avocados, quinoa, and mangos, as well as the occasionally less desirable plants that have been a bit too successful at outcompeting many native species, including kudzu. While his work was at times covert and others an act of diplomacy, he helped to create agricultural relationships that expanded the agro-economy of the U.S. and diversified the nutrition and palates of Americans.

Departures

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2022.

John Boggan, Botanical Type Register Manager for the US Herbarium, retired at the end of March 2022. Boggan began his career in the Department of Botany in 1991 as a contractor for the Biological Diversity of the Guianas program, working with Vicki Funk and Carol Kelloff as their data manager. He then went on to become a research assistant for Larry Skog and co-authored several papers on Gesneriaceae, and also worked for Jun Wen.

He became the Type Register Manager in 2003 and was responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the Type collection, which currently numbers around 115,000 botanical Type specimens. He also managed the Botanical Type Specimen Register and added approximately 500-1000 new Type records per year to Botany’s data catalog, making the US Herbarium Type Register one of the finest and most complete in the world. Before retirement, Boggan rearranged the Type Herbarium to reflect the APG IV (Angiosperm Phylogeny Group) conversion ongoing in the general herbarium. Boggan was particularly good at finding a Type designation from a few clues on a specimen, and he was amazing at reading bad handwriting on labels. We will miss his talents and dedication to the collection.

Specimen collected by Smithsonian botanist in the 1920s determined to be a new species nearly a century later

From Plant Press, Vol. 25, No. 2, April 2022.

By Jerald Pinson (Florida Museum of Natural History)

A plant specimen that had been collected in northwestern Haiti in 1929 by Smithsonian botanist E.C. Leonard has led researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History to the discovery of a new plant species, Castela senticosa, which they recommend be designated as endangered. The plant, which grows as a small bush sheathed in an imposing layer of spines, was recently found during a survey to catalog the flora of the Martín García mountain range in the Dominican Republic and compared to the Leonard specimen.

Castela senticosa produces flowers and fruit at the tail-end of the dry season, when most other plants are still dormant. Although risky, this allows them to stand out to pollinators and dispersers that might otherwise miss them in the dense vegetation common during the rainy season. (photo courtesy of Systematic Botany)

“We were collecting everything we came across with the goal of having a complete species list for the entire mountain range,” said lead author Lucas Majure, an assistant curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History and curator of the University of Florida Herbarium.

Hispaniola’s mountains support large swaths of intact tropical dry forests, highly diverse ecosystems that — like the rainforests they border — are globally imperiled due to the combined effects of deforestation, overharvesting and climate change. But although they face the same threats, the destruction of a tropical dry forest might mean the loss of considerably more species. That’s because rainforests are often found in lowland basins, where conditions like rainfall, temperature and soil type are similar over large areas. While species diversity is high, many rainforest plants can have distributions that span hundreds of miles.