Farewell to a Giant of Botany

RIP. He was (perhaps unknowingly) a great friend of my country. The Missouri Botanical Garden (under his leadership) helped a lot to help and increase the Paraguayan Herbarium collection at the Chair of Botany of the Faculty of Chemical Sciences, National University of Asunción back in the 1990s, and perhaps this association was sustained over the years. The botanists there looked up to the MBG as the landmark and example of how botany should be done.

(Some might wonder why a chemistry school has a botany department. Well, that school taught pharmacy since the 1930s and pharmacists use plants as medicines so yes, botany was part of the core school activities right from the beginning...)

For anyone visiting St Louis, I would recommend skipping the zoo (it's geared more toward children and feels like an amusement park) and head straight to the Botanical Garden. I spent several hours there and really enjoyed myself. It is a true gem!

RIP Peter Raven

I met him about 10 years ago at a Southern California Botanists event. For someone held in very high esteem by most botanists (the organizers even printed t-shirts with his face on them), he was very humble and down to earth.

Among all of his accomplishments, one of the most important is the paper he co-authored with Paul Ehrlich on the coevolution of plants and the animals that eat them. It demonstrated the "arms race" where plants have evolved the ability to produce toxic chemicals to prevent herbivory while at the same time animals that feed on plants have evolved adaptations that allow them to detoxify these chemicals or otherwise not be affected by them. It is considered one of the foundational papers of modern ecology.

Ehrlich, Paul R. and Peter H. Raven. 1964. Butterflies and plants: a study in coevolution. Evolution 18: 586-608. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.1964...

RIP from somebody who regularly gets a student minder in the gardens, because they are afraid somebody is getting clipped.