John Hutchinson (botanist)

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John Hutchinson (born April 7, 1884 in Wark on Tyne , Northumberland , † September 2, 1972 in Kew ) was an English botanist . Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Hutch. ".

Live and act

Hutchinson was the son of a gardener and followed in his father's footsteps. In 1904 he took up a position as a gardener in London's famous Kew Gardens , where he met its director Joseph Dalton Hooker and was subsequently able to work in the herbarium .

For the subsequent volumes of the work Flora of Tropical Africa by Daniel Oliver , begun in 1868, he edited, partly in collaboration with co-authors, "Euphorbiaceae" (1911–1913, together with NE Brown and David Prain , in volume 6 (1)) , “Moraceae” (1916–1917, together with Alfred Barton Rendle , in Volume 6 (2)) and “Myricaceae” (1917).

In 1926 he published the first and in 1934 the second part of his work The Families of Flowering Plants ; in the first he treated the dicotyledons and in the second the monocotyledons . Its taxonomy from a phylogenetic point of view is one of the earliest of its kind. Today, however, the work is largely taxonomically outdated.

At about the same time, from 1927 to 1936, he worked with John McEwan Dalziel on Flora of West Tropical Africa , a work comprising more than 6000 species with detailed descriptions and numerous illustrations.

Hutchinson made two botanical trips to South Africa , the first from August 1928 to April 1929 and the second from June to September 1930.

From 1936 until his retirement in 1948 he was Keeper of the Museum of Kew Gardens. In 1959 he published a revised edition of his "Families" in which he made a basic taxonomic separation between herbaceous and woody plants (see plant growth forms ). This approach - which he continued in his three-volume The Genera of Flowering Plants , which appeared in 1964 - led to extensive rejection of his late work by the professional world.

Honors

The Royal Horticultural Society honored him with the Veitch Memorial Medal in 1945 . In 1947 he was elected a member of the Royal Society . In 1965 he was awarded the Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society of London . Hutchinson, the plant genus is Hutchinsonia Robyns from the family of the redness plants named (Rubiaceae).

Works

  • The Families of Flowering Plants . (1926 and 1934; 2nd edition 1959, 3rd edition 1973).
  • The Genera of Flowering Plants . (1964-1967).
  • Key to the families of flowering plants of the world . 1967.
  • Common Wild Flowers . 1945.
  • More common wild flowers . 1948.
  • Uncommon Wild Flowers . 1950.
  • A botanist in Southern Africa . London 1946.
  • Evolution and phylogeny of flowering plants. Dicotyledons: ... 1969.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names . Extended Edition. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin, Free University Berlin Berlin 2018. [1]

Web links