From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 1, January 2023.
By Virginia Vélez Thaxton, horticulturist with the Smithsonian Gardens
As a Smithsonian Gardens employee who loves working with plants, visiting a herbarium is always a treat. In the fall I was lucky to be part of a very special visit to the United States National Herbarium, with some special guests from afar, which I coordinated with Gary Krupnick (National Museum of Natural History).
The guest were representatives of three generations of descendants of Armando Dugand, a Colombian botanist, who collected almost 3,000 specimens from the late 1930s to the 1960s. The specimens are housed at the US National Herbarium and the guest also happen to be my relatives!
The short and emotional visit took place on the morning of October 13. During a visit to Washington DC, my cousin Beatriz Dugand, Armando’s granddaughter, her son Orlando Visbal, and her grandson David Visbal, got the opportunity to see in person some of the plants collected and described by their relative years ago.
The botanist Armando Dugand Gnecco (1906-1971) was an important scientist in his native Colombia during the 20th century. From 1940 to 1953, he was director of the Institute of Natural Sciences of the National University of Colombia, and in 1940 he co-founded the scientific journal Caldasia. He was a member of the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (ASPT) and the International Association for Plant Taxonomy (IAPT). He is author to many taxonomical names in the Colombian flora, with 242 names published according to IPNI (International Plant Names Index).
Throughout his career he maintained correspondence and scientific collaborations with several Smithsonian scientists, such as José Cuatrecasas, Ellsworth Killip, and Alexander Wetmore (sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution). In 1941 Wetmore met Dugand when he visited Bogotá to enhance communication and exchange between the Smithsonian and the country of Colombia. In 1944 Killip, as associate curator in the United States National Museum's Division of Plants, spent a month working with Dugand at the Institute of Natural Sciences Herbarium in Bogotá. Later, in 1966, Dugand was invited to work on herbarium specimens at the Smithsonian’s Department of Botany.
My family’s recent visit had great meaning to me given my career path and my own connection to the Smithsonian. When I was growing up my family would tell me that I was following in Papachi’s (as his grandchildren lovingly called him) footsteps by studying biology and horticulture. During and after the visit, I talked to my cousin Beatriz about her memories and what she had learned from her grandfather, the scientist. In her eyes, her grandfather was a multifaceted, intelligent, and self-taught man who loved plants and animals, and was passionate about the flora and fauna of his native Colombia. He dedicated so much time and love to his botany profession.
When she was little, Beatriz remembers learning a lot of things from him in the small office room at his house that was full of wall-to-wall books, and plant and animal specimens that he had collected. She remembers road trips to the outskirts of the city where he would stop the car on the side of the road to look at and collect plants. At a young age he was teaching her plant names and how to press and dry plants in newspaper to create an herbarium, and in the process, she learned to love nature. Later, as a teenager, she visited Washington DC with him in 1966 when he was invited to conduct work at the U.S. National Herbarium. On weekends she remembers visiting the herbarium and being fascinated by the cabinets filled with thousands of plants. He would explain to her the names of the plants she was seeing, where they were from, and how they were collected. But what she remembers the most is the happiness and satisfaction on his face as she could tell he was so happy in that big room surrounded by the work he loved. When they went back to Colombia, he always talked about how special his year at the Smithsonian had been.
Beatriz had this to say about the recent visit, “Having the opportunity to visit, with my son and grandson, the herbarium at the Smithsonian this past fall was extremely special and emotional to me. I could feel my grandfather’s presence and remember my past visits and his happiness in that space. We were so thankful to Gary Krupnick for his hospitality and for allowing us to see many of the pressed plants that my grandfather collected himself back in the day.”
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