The following is one of five profiles that appeared in Pond
& Garden May-June 2000, Volume 2, Issue 1 as part of
"People, Places & Plants of the PCL of Waterlily Names".
The Introduction, linked below, explains how the articles came
about.
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Dr. John Wiersema
By Kit Knotts & John Wiersema
Reprinted from Pond & Garden May-June 2000
Click images to enlarge
Another problem with building the PCL was that I had no
example to go by. I was sent Registers and Registration Forms
of other genera but really had no clue what information should
be included in the PCL. I received generous guidance from Dr.
Alan Leslie and Piers Trehane of the ISHS (International Society
for Horticultural Science), the organization which governs this
work, but it was occasional and sporadic.
I believe that these gentlemen realized I was a lay person (but willing!) and added to the job description gradually. It's a good thing that it was gradual because I would have been totally intimidated by the requirements if presented at the outset. I was told early that I was not required to include information about Nymphaea species. As the cultivar list took shape it was "suggested" that species information be included in order to be sure that ALL names had been researched in search of cultivar names.
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Ahhhggg! How was I to do this? "Trawl" the databases was the humorously offhand answer. I trawled databases until I was blue, everything I could find on the Web, including Missouri Botanical Garden's W3Tropicos, Harvard's Gray Card Index and, most importantly, GRIN. It's author, Dr. John Wiersema, was on our committee thanks to Betsy. The list of names with which we began was compiled by Philip Swindells in 1988 and, though it was only names, incomplete and out of date, it was a start. When I sent it out I received extensive notes from John about species names on that list, duly entered them in the database and didn't really appreciate their value. When suddenly confronted with hundreds of names found trawling, John became my new best friend. |
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John is one of the leading taxonomists in the world, has a special interst in waterlilies and has done an astounding amount of work in aid of this PCL. I am embarrassed to look back at the dumb questions I asked him before I finally woke up to just how important he and GRIN are to the plant world. He kept telling me that the currently accepted species names were all in his database. Simple. Don't complicate it.
Once that penetrated, I was still stuck with all these "other" names that I had to put somewhere. John, within about 48 hours, researched each and every one of them, put them in the GRIN database (available on line) with their currently accepted synonyms, sent them to me and added notes for clarification as needed. WOW! More questions arose and John's turn-around time for answers got shorter (if you can imagine that from this incredibly busy man), sometimes firing back within hours. The result is that our PCL has absolutely up-to-date chapter-and-verse information on Nymphaea species names from the world's leading authority in the field.
Naturally once the dust settled, I had to ask > May I include you in the article for Pond & Garden? Will you tell me about yourself?
John wrote:
Currently, I am a botanist in the Systematic Botany and Mycology Laboratory of the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland. My primary responsibilities involve providing taxonomic and nomenclatural expertise to the National Plant Germplasm System through its Germplasm Resources Information Network (GRIN). I have worked in this capacity since 1984 (initially as a research associate of the University of Maryland), acquiring considerable experience and data on the nomenclature of economic plants.
Much of my first twenty-four years of life was spent in western Michigan, growing up, as the fourth of eight children, in a semi-rural environment near Muskegon and later attending Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. With a B.S. in Psychology and Sociology completed in 1974, I moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama to work in a state mental-retardation institution.* ** Later I attended the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, completing both a M.S. and a Ph.D. in biology by 1984 under the supervision of Dr. Robert R. Haynes, an aquatic plant taxonomist. My graduate studies focused on the systematics of aquatic vascular plants, particularly those of the water-lilies and their relatives.
> John, how in the world did you get from here* to there**?
Here is your missing link: Already confronting the realization
of future psychological burnout, I had begun undergraduate work
in biology, although never having taken a botany course, in the
last two years in Michigan and finished with an undeclared biology
minor involving 20 semester hours. Having exhausted my undergraduate
schooling options (i.e., funds), I was then compelled to enter
the work force with the only marketable major I had completed,
psychology. Some two years later, with the knowledge
gained from my biology coursework and independent study I was
able to score sufficiently well in biology on the GRE exam to
achieve conditional admission to a graduate biology program at
the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where I then resided.
A few more undergraduate courses were required in graduate school
to remedy deficiencies, but within a year these were completed
and I was on my way to a botany career.
| Childhood had instilled in me an appreciation for the outdoors, and some 50,000 miles of travel around North America during my undergraduate years ignited a love of adventure, so in graduate school with my first exposure to taxonomic botany I was hooked on botanical fieldwork. A Master's study of water-lilies throughout Alabama focused my attention on the genus Nymphaea, which, not having been studied much since Conard's monograph in 1905, was an excellent subject for new discoveries. I therefore began, as a doctoral project, the study of the little-known tropical American subgenus Hydrocallis. Five new species were brought to light during this study, with fieldwork taking me to Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, and Argentina and visits to several European herbaria as well to study prior collections. |
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| John collecting in Brazil | |||
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With my move to Maryland in 1984, most of these earlier cultures soon perished due to inadequate maintenance facilities. The USDA position brought a change from a field- or laboratory-oriented botanist studying water-lilies to a literature- or database-orientation focusing on agricultural plants. While my interest in water-lilies necessarily took a backseat to this other activity, it has survived due to occasional field expeditions, study of species in cultivation, and periodic contributions to water-lily taxonomy, such as preparation of the treatment for the Flora of North America. Most species have now been restored to cultivation from subsequent expeditions or exchanges with botanical colleagues. About 35 species of the ca. 45 known species are now in cultivation, representing some 50 wild collections. | |
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| John collecting in Guyana | ||
The Gospel According To GRIN
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