Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Howard S. Irwin, 1928–2019

2019; Wiley; Volume: 68; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/tax.12084

1996-8175

Dorothy Irwin,

Fern and Epiphyte Biology

Howard S. Irwin, a botanist and environmentalist who was the last scientist to serve as president of the New York Botanical Garden, died at home in Truro, MA, on January 23, at the age of 90. Irwin's active interest in botany was lifelong. He first visited the New York Botanical Garden as a boy during a class trip. He was hired as a research associate in tropical botany in 1960 by the head curator of NYBG's herbarium, Bassett Maguire, and within six weeks of receiving his doctorate from the University of Texas, Irwin drove his family from Austin to New York, settled them in an apartment, and left to join a team collecting plant specimens in Suriname. His participation in such fieldwork, headed by Maguire and based in Guyana, Suriname, and northern Brazil, continued for several years, until Irwin was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to conduct his own program of botanical exploration and collection in the savannah region of south-central Brazil, known as the Planalto. While international cooperation has long been a hallmark of the sciences, it doesn't always prevail in practice. Recalling in 2003 his arrival at a site in Suriname in July 1963, Irwin said: “The thing that amazed me when I got there was that the American members of the expedition were in one camp and the Dutch—the Surinamers—were in another about a half-mile away, which is an extremely inefficient way to run an expedition.” Furthermore, the expedition's leader had a self-important bearing that irritated the Surinamers. Irwin recalled, “This was their country; they didn't want him coming in and telling them what to do.” Abruptly the leader was called away to attend to some other matter; a plane landed the next day and picked him up, leaving Irwin in charge. Among the things Irwin found in the camp was a case of Scotch. He remembered: “A light went off in my head: This was a good way to get this group together. We introduced ourselves to one another and got to know one another, and out came the Johnnie Walker, and everybody felt very good, and we made one camp after that.” The following year, 1964, when establishing guidelines for his expeditions in Brazil's Planalto, Irwin chose a unified setup from the start, an approach that was pragmatic but also principled. He later wrote: “The language of the camp was Portuguese, for the most part, to keep everyone in touch (though it caused some consternation among some of the principals) and to help prevent the all-too-common tendency to have a camp divide along linguistic lines. To promote a spirit of unity, we each enjoyed a cup of pinga com limão (crude rum with lime juice) as suppertime approached. We sat around a common table for a dinner of rice, beans, and whatever fish or meat happened to be caught, bantered about the day's events, and discussed plans for the coming day.” For Irwin, the focus on the task at hand was enhanced by promoting collegiality in these rustic circumstances—in which he was, after all, not a native but a guest. The core Planalto team generally numbered about four, far smaller than the groups in Suriname, which could involve as many as 20 people. The Brazilians on Irwin's team included a specialist in climbing trees, an indispensable skill for collecting specimens from palms and other high-growing trees; a cook; and a mechanic who oversaw the jeeps and former school bus in which the crew negotiated the rough terrain and rickety improvised bridges. Also participating were graduate students, and botanists from the Universidade de Brasília, NYBG, and institutions including the Smithsonian and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Irwin's annual three-month expeditions spanned from 1964 to 1972, with a full calendar year, 1965–66, based in Brasília, with his family. The specimens, collected in multiples, were shipped back to NYBG to become part of its herbarium but were also, by convention, shared with the Universidade de Brasília and other botanical gardens around the globe, and formed the basis of studies classifying many new species of plants in what was then a taxonomically little-known part of the world. The online catalog of the program describes its 42,000 specimens as “one of the jewels of the NYBG Herbarium”. Beginning in 1971, Irwin was promoted to increasingly administrative positions to foster what he called “my education in botanical garden administration and politics”, which culminated in his assuming the presidency of NYBG in 1973, a post he held for six years. He soon found that his new duties precluded his oversight of the program in Brazil; intent that the work should continue, he handed the reins to Dr. William Anderson, who completed the last three years of collection. The meticulous analysis in preparation of related monographs was crafted in collaboration with the taxonomist Rupert Barneby. Both Anderson and Barneby were also members of NYBG's staff. More about the Planalto program, including a list of participants, photographs, and Irwin's final report to the National Science Foundation, are posted at http://sciweb.nybg.org/science2/hcol/planalto/photos3.asp.html. Irwin's rise to the presidency of NYBG coincided with the worst fiscal crisis in New York City's history. City funding to cultural institutions was slashed; at the botanical garden, according to Irwin's later recollections, it was cut from about 50 percent in 1960 to 27 percent in the mid-’70s. The research grants kept coming, educational programs continued, and its library and herbarium were—and are—internationally renowned. But to the casual visitor, NYBG looked forlorn, conveying what Irwin later described as “a disappointingly shabby image that was dissonant with the institution's reputation for scholarly excellence”. The staff was reduced, vandalism was rife, and security suddenly required major expense. “Visitation fell off”, he recalled. “Support for the Garden from foundations, banks and private individuals declined.” The heads of two contiguous institutions—Fordham University and the Bronx Zoo—faced similar challenges, and the three men met occasionally to compare notes and share strategies. In the years following New York's financial meltdown, as public funds continued to dry up, it became clear that presidents of cultural institutions in the city and beyond required, first and foremost, business acumen. The new urgency for corporate and private donations demanded a different kind of know-how at the helm. Howard Samuel Irwin Jr. was born on March 28, 1928, in Louisville, KY, to Grace (Cole) Irwin, a homemaker, and Howard Sr., a safety engineer who had been appointed resident engineer for the south-central territory by Liberty Mutual Insurance. After several years the family returned to New York, settling first in Queens, then in East Williston on Long Island. Irwin earned a certificate from Mount Hermon, a preparatory school in Gill, MA, and attended one year at Hofstra University, before relocating with his family to Seattle in 1947. He received a bachelor of arts (1950) and of education (1952) from the University of Puget Sound. With his wife Marian (Sterne) Irwin and baby daughter, Irwin moved to British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1952 to teach biology at Queen's College, the colony's preeminent high school for boys, where he was the first of several Fulbright instructors to join the staff. The post continued for four years, during which Irwin's interest in the native flora prompted him to use his school vacations to trek remote sites, such as Mount Roraima and Kaieteur Falls, and also to make his first trip to Brazil to visit the agricultural college in Minas Gerais. The cell specialist whom he went there to see was a Japanese-born Brazilian, educated at the Sorbonne. Irwin had yet to learn any Portuguese; the two men managed to communicate in French, using Latin for technical terms. In 2003, recalling his motivation for fieldwork during his years in British Guiana, Irwin said, “I really felt driven to go and actually see the plants myself, photograph them, even make sketches of some of them.” He had received copies of herbarium records from the Smithsonian, in which George Bentham had noted that a particular cassia had been collected at Orealla, an Amerindian village on the banks of the Corentyne River, overlooking Suriname. “I saw it there on the map and it was reachable, it wasn't difficult—it didn't look difficult. And so I went there and by golly, I found the plants, the very group where the species had been encountered in the first place. It was a very moving trip, to do that. I had visions of eventually reorganizing the publication records that I had, which dated back to 1875 or so. A lot of new species had been discovered since then and they hadn't been integrated into this material. That's what I was hoping to eventually do. And eventually I did, with Rupert's [Rupert Barneby's] help.” Among the highlights of Irwin's tenure as the sixth president of the New York Botanical Garden was the desperately needed restoration of the 11-chambered glass Conservatory, made possible by a bequest from Enid Haupt. In addition, NYBG began to oversee a 1900-acre tract of land held in trust in Millbrook, NY, that became the Mary Flagler Cary Arboretum, an early proponent of ecology and environmental research (now an independent institution, the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies). During his years at NYBG, Irwin taught botany as an adjunct at Columbia University and The City University of New York. Following an appointment as vice chancellor for resource development by Long Island University, Irwin directed Clark Botanic Garden, a former estate in Albertson, NY, that had been donated to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Under his stewardship, Clark Garden became an independent institution run by Nassau County. Irwin retired from Clark Garden in 1991 to edit the fourth edition (1996) of America's garden book, by James and Louise Bush-Brown, for Macmillan, work that he undertook upon moving to Truro, on Cape Cod. Among his other publications are Roadside flowers of Texas, with paintings by Mary Motz Wills (University of Texas Press, 1961); Amazon jungle: Green hell to red desert?, which he coauthored with Robert Goodland (Elsevier Scientific Publishing, 1975); and an article for Scientific American, “The history of the Airflow car” (August 1977, pp. 98–107), concerning the Chrysler Airflow, a 1934 model of which Irwin restored and entered at car shows. As a resident of Cape Cod, Irwin served for many years as chairman of the Truro Conservation Commission, was a board member for town planning organizations, and represented Truro on the Cape Cod National Seashore Advisory Board. His popular weekly gardening column was published by the Provincetown Banner for 13 years. He continued gardening on his own property as long as his health allowed. Irwin's first marriage ended in divorce. In 1979 he married Anne Lieb Wolff, who survives him, as do two daughters, Elizabeth Irwin Moore and Dorothy Irwin; two stepdaughters, Nina Wolff and Amy Wolff; a stepson, Eric Wolff; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Contributions in his memory may be made to the Truro Conservation Trust, P.O. Box 327, North Truro, MA 02652, U.S.A.