Charles Sprague Sargent

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Charles Sprague Sargent

Charles Sprague Sargent (born April 24, 1841 in Boston , † March 22, 1927 ibid) was a North American botanist who dealt primarily with dendrology . From 1873 he was the first director of the Boston Arnold Arboretum , which he played a key role in shaping his plans and which he directed for more than 50 years until his death.

Its official botanical author abbreviation is “ Sarg. "

Family, youth and education

The park of Holm Lea, the estate of the Sargent family, was known for its extensive rhododendron plantations.

Charles Sprague Sargent was the youngest of three children of the Boston merchant and banker Ignatius Sargent and his wife Henrietta, nee Gray. His father was professionally successful and very wealthy, especially through clever investments in the construction of the Boston & Albany Railroad. The family was part of the social elite of Boston .

In 1847 the father bought a summer house in Jamaica Plain , the property of which he enlarged to 130 acres (approx. 50 hectares) through steady acquisitions by 1873. From 1852 the family lived all year round on the property that Sargent gave the name "Holm Lea".

Charles Sprague Sargent attended private schools in his childhood and youth and enrolled at Harvard College in 1858 . In 1862 he left Harvard with a degree in Classical Studies and then entered the army. He served until the end of the American Civil War in 1865, most recently with the rank of Infantry Officer (Commissioned Officer).

He then traveled to Europe for three years, where he also visited various botanical gardens. In 1868 he returned to Boston. Since he initially had no particular professional ambitions, he decided to take over the gardening management of his father's Holm Lea estate . His horticultural and botanical interests were influenced by his cousin, the landscape gardener Henry Winthrop Sargent (* 1810; † 1882) and the railroad entrepreneur and amateur botanist Horatio Hollis Hunnewell (* 1810; † 1902), who was largely related to the family .

In 1873, at the age of 32, he married Mary Allen Robeson (* 1853; † 1919) from Boston, with whom he had five children, two sons and three daughters. His daughter Henrietta married the landscape architect Guy Lowell (* 1870, † 1927) in 1898. His son Andrew Robeson Sargent (* 1876, † 1918) became a landscape architect and worked for his brother-in-law's company.

Charles Sprague Sargent was a distant cousin of the painter John Singer Sargent .

Arnold Arboretum

Charles Sprague Sargent at work on his herbarium
The Hunnewell Building, the administrative seat of the Arnold Arboretums

After Francis Parkman had to give up his only one year professorship in horticulture at the Bussey Institute at Harvard University for health reasons in 1872, Charles Sprague Sargent was appointed as his successor in May 1872. Parkmann owned an estate in the immediate vicinity of Holm Lea and was friends with Sargent, which is why it is assumed that he recommended his younger neighbors as his successor. In order to relieve the botanist Asa Gray , whose professorship at Harvard was also associated with the management of the Botanical Garden in Cambridge , Charles Sprague Sargent was also appointed director as Gray's successor. He gave up the management of the Botanical Garden in 1879 in order to be able to devote himself entirely to his duties at the Arnold Arboretum.

In 1872, Charles Sprague Sargent was also appointed curator, and then in 1873 director of the newly founded Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University. At the time of the appointment, the area on which the arboretum was to be built had only just been designated. Since there was no institute building yet, Sargent was initially given an office space each in the Bussey Institute, which was located in the immediate vicinity of the planned arboretum, and in the Gray Herbarium building in Cambridge. Sargent also used Dwight House , a larger building on his Holm Lea family's estate , which was near the future arboretum. In Dwight House he first housed his library and herbarium, and later also the administration of the arboretum. In 1892 this moved to the Hunnewell building, which was built on the site of the Arnold Arboretum and from then on served as its administrative headquarters.

Sargent spent nearly a decade planning and laying out the arboretum. Since it was the first arboretum in the USA, there was no role model to orientate himself on. Almost 50 years later, Sargent wrote that neither the board of directors of the university, nor he, as the future director of the arboretum, had any idea of ​​what an arboretum should actually be and the amount of work and financial costs involved in maintaining it was. Since the costs of the facility far exceeded the assets made available by its founder Arnold, Sargent had to find further sponsors and donors himself in order to finance the arboretum. His good contacts with numerous wealthy Boston families were of great help to him.

The area made available for the arboretum was damaged by overgrazing and overgrowth and had to be recultivated in some cases. From 1878 Sargent worked with the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted , who designed a path system with a plan of designated areas for certain plant families and species for the arboretum. The arrangement of the plants according to taxonomic criteria was based on the botanical classification according to George Bentham and Hooker .

Sargent reached through negotiations with the city of Boston that this signed a contract with Harvard University in 1882, with which the city bought the land from the university on which the arboretum was built, making it subordinate to the Boston park administration. In return, Harvard University leased the site for a symbolic sum of one dollar per year and for a period of 1,000 years. The city of Boston agreed in the contract to provide for the maintenance of the boundary wall, the gates and the path system and to provide police surveillance. The administration of the arboretum was guaranteed complete autonomy in decisions concerning the collection of plants and in the administration of the buildings. She committed herself to making the arboretum accessible to the public with free admission and throughout the year.

After the successful conclusion of this contract, Charles Sprague Sargent devoted himself above all to expanding the plant collection and the structural equipment of the arboretum. A separate fund was finally set up for the construction, furnishing and maintenance of the buildings.

Charles Sprague Sargent served as director of the arboretum until his death in year. In the course of his service, he successfully campaigned to enlarge the area of ​​the site, which at the time of his death was eight times the area originally made available. At that time the arboretum housed over 6,500 named and signposted woody species from 339 genera. The library of the arboretum that he founded contained more than 40,000 publications on woody plants in 1927, of which Sargent had donated over 6,000 volumes from his personal possessions. Today it contains over 100,000 publications.

Use for forest protection

Charles Sprague Sargent (left) together with Francis Skinner and George Engelmann on an expedition on the occasion of the 10th US Forestry Census, 1880 in California

The high demand for construction timber and firewood led the US Department of Agriculture's forestry department to conduct a survey on the state of American forests in the early 1880s. Sargent was commissioned to coordinate this tenth US forest census. In this role worked with several scientists who carried out the surveys of the various forest regions. These included the botanists Sereno Watson and Cyrus Guernsey Pringle (1838–1911) and the pharmacologist Charles Theodore Mohr .

He used the work on this forest survey, in the course of which he also undertook extensive botanical excursions in various forest regions, to study the botany of the North American forests and to get to know better. On this occasion, he collected trunks of various trees as exhibits for the American Museum of Natural History , which were supplemented by botanical illustrations made by his wife. On this occasion he also began to create a herbarium, which became the basis of the herbarium of the Arnold Arboretum, which at his death finally comprised around 200,000 specimens of woody plants.

His comprehensive final report of the survey, the Report on the Forests of North America , which appeared in 1884, is Charles Sprague Sargent's first major publication in the field of forest botany wood processing industry as well as the value of the different trees for the different types of use. On the basis of Sargent's final report, the ministry developed a national strategy for the sustainable use and conservation of forests and their resources.

Sargent later took part in other surveys on behalf of the government, such as the Northern Pacific Transcontinental Survey of Northwest forests (1882-1883) and the Adirondack forestland for New York State . In 1884 he was chairman of the New York Commission for the establishment of Adirondack Park and Catskill Park and in 1896 of the committee of the National Academy of Science for the preparation of a federal regulation for the protection of forests. In 1897 he was involved in a congressional commission under President Grover Cleveland for the designation of further forest reserves in the USA, but was so disappointed by the political debates and the sluggishness of legislation that he finally withdrew from his commitment to state forest protection, although The protection of the forests was an important concern for him.

Honors

Memorial plaque for Charles Sprague Sargent in the Arnold Arboretum

The botanist Sereno Watson named Charles Sprague Sargent in honor of the plant genus Sargentia from the family of Rutaceae (Rutaceae). His close colleague in the arboretum, the botanist Alfred Rehder and the plant hunter Ernest Henry Wilson named the genus Sargentodoxa from the finger fruit family (Lardizabalaceae) after him. The German dendrologist Bernhard Adalbert Emil Koehne named the Prunus subgroup Sargentiella after him.

The magazine “Sargentia”, published from 1942 to 1949, is also named after him.

At the age of 60, Harvard University awarded him an honorary doctorate in law.

Charles Sprague Sargent has been honored by numerous national and international scientific associations for his services in the field of botany, especially dendrology:

Sargent was President of the Massachusetts Society of Agriculture and Vice President of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society for 25 years. He served on the board of directors of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Brookline Library.

A plaque commemorates him in the Arnold Arboretum.

Works

Simaruba glauca , illustration by CE Faxon from The silva of North America

From 1888 to 1897 Charles Sprague Sargent was editor of the weekly magazine "Garden and Forest", which brought forest topics to a broader public.

As early as 1874 he published a comprehensive catalog of the woody plants cultivated in the arboretum, which also contained a list of the plants that were further propagated there. At the time of his death he was working on a catalog of the trees cultivated in the arboretum, which he could no longer complete.

He worked on his main work, the Silva of North America , which appeared in 14 volumes between 1891 and 1902 , for 21 years and traveled to numerous regions of America. He worked with the botanical illustrator Charles Edward Faxon , who also made illustrations for several other of his works. The " Silva " was the first comprehensive botanical work on American dendrology since The North American Sylva , published more than 70 years earlier . by François André Michaux . The naturalist and geologist John Muir , who had a close friendship with Sargent, praised the work in a recession published in Atlantic Monthly after the last volume was published:

"I have read it through twice, as if it were a novel, and wished it were longer."

- John Muir : Sargent's Silva in The Atlantic Monthly , July 1903, pp. 9-21

"I read it through twice as if it were a novel, and I wished it were longer."

- John Muir : Sargent's Silva in The Atlantic Monthly , July 1903, pp. 9-21

Publications

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Walter H. Marx: Ignatius Sargent and the Arnold Arboretum. from the Jamaica Plain Historical Society homepage, accessed April 11, 2016
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h Karen Hovde: Biographical Portrait: Charles Sprague Sargent (1841 - 1827). In: Forest History Today, Spring 2002, pp. 38-39
  3. ^ A b c d e f g h i j k l m n William Trelease : Biographical Memoir of Charles Strague Sargent - presented to the Academy at the Annual Meeting, 1928. In: National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America - Biographical Memoirs. Volume XII., 7th Memoir, pp. 247-270
  4. ^ Walter Muir Whitehill: Francis Parkman as Horticulturist. In: Arnoldia 33 (3), 1973, pp. 169-183
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University: Archives IB CSS Charles Sprague Sargent (1841-1927) papers, 1868-: Guide. 1997-2013
  6. ↑ George Bentham, Joseph Dalton Hooker: Genera plantarum. Ad exemplaria imprimis in Herberiis Kewensibus servata definita. A. Black, London 1862-1883
  7. ^ Charles Sprague Sargent: Letter of Trandmittal. In: Report on the Forests of North America. 1884, S, IX
  8. ^ Report on the Forests of North America. on archive.org
  9. ↑ Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Sargent, Charles Sprague
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American botanist
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1841
PLACE OF BIRTH Boston
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1927
Place of death Boston