Myron William Kimnach

Myron William Kimnach (born December 26, 1922 in Los Angeles ; † September 21, 2018 there ) was an American botanist . Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Kimnach ".

Life

He was the son of Ida and Elmer Kimnach, a Hollywood veterinarian. He grew up in California but moved with his parents to Palo Alto in the late 1930s , where his father opened a new practice. His father passed away during his senior year at Palo Alto High School. During World War II, he served four years with the US Coast Guard at locations in Hawaii , Guam and Okinawa .

At the age of 27 he published his first article in the Cactus and Succulent Journal (CSJ) on mathematical relationships in the plant kingdom. He was in lively correspondence with Paul Clifford Hutchison , director of the University of California Botanical Gardens (UCBG). In 1951, Hutchinson offered him a job as a gardener. In the following years, the two worked very closely together, although Myron Kimnach never completed a botanical education.

He was interested in orchids, haworthias, echeverias and epiphytic cacti throughout his life. He looked after her as a young man while working at UCBG and later in his greenhouse in Monrovia .

He has described over 100 species of plants.

Important expeditions

In the early 1980s he carried out expeditions to Central and South America. He traveled to Costa Rica , the West Indies , Bolivia and Peru . Later, between 1985 and 2001, expeditions to Somalia , Madagascar , Morocco , Yemen and Socotra took him .

From October to December 1959, at the invitation of Reid Moran , he made his first trip to Mexico. In April he had published an article on Echeveria cante in the CSJ . On this trip they collected over 30 species of Echeveria and over 60 species from the thick-leaf family (Crassulaceae). From this fund, Moran later described Pachyphytum glutinicaule , Sedum furfuraceum and Villadia patula , among others . In 2004 Moran and Kimnach described Echeveria nebularum from this same collection.

On this first trip to Mexico in 1959, he also came into contact with Mexican botanists. One of them was Hernándo Sánchez-Mejorada . Together with him, Kimnach undertook further expeditions (1976, 1977, 1981) through Mexico. The results of these trips were the discovery of sites of Agave filifera subsp. microceps , a yellow-flowered Mammillaria lindsayii , Mammillaria bocensis , Ferocactus alamosanus and Hechtia stenopetala . On the 1976 trip, new locations of Graptopetalum saxifragoides and Sedum suaveolens were discovered. On the third trip with Sánchez-Mejorada and Jim Bauml in 1981 in the El Sumidero Canyon, Weberocereus glaber subsp. mirandae and Echeveria prunina found.

In 1992 he undertook another trip to southern Mexico with Rudi Dorsch, Miguel Cházaro and Martin Negrete.

Together with Seymour Linden (President of the CSSA ) he made four trips. The first took her to Costa Rica in 1983 together with Clarence Horich . It was u. a. Plant leocereus imitans found, a plant that Kimnach and Paul Clifford Hutchison had already described in 1956. The second trip was to Bolivia and Peru in the central Andes. They were accompanied by the amateur botanist and Sulcorebutia connoisseur John Donald and met u. a. Carlos Ostolaza . The main focus of this trip for Kimnach was the recovery of Rhipsalis incachacana . He had already published in 1983 in A Revision of Acanthorhipsalis and with the description of the new genus Lymanbensonia about the species.

1985 and 1986 he traveled to Africa. On his first trip he came to Namibia and South Africa . He went on the second trip again with Seymour Linden. He traveled to Namaqualand . The focus of the trip was the ice plant and the thick leaf plants.

In 1995 he went on an expedition to Madagascar with Seymour Linden and John Jacob Lavranos . The result of this trip was the new description of Euphorbia itremensis Kimnach & Lavranos in 2001.

Honors

The genus Kimnachia S.Arias & N.Korotkova was named after him in 2017 . Furthermore, u. a. the species Disocactus kimnachii R.D. Rowley , Pachyphytum kimnachii Moran and Sedum kimnachii V.V.Byalt named after him.

In 2010 he was awarded the Cactus d'Or in Monaco .

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• Walter Erhardt among others: The big pikeperch. Encyclopedia of Plant Names . Volume 2, page 1969. Verlag Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 2008. ISBN 978-3-8001-5406-7
• Catherine Phillips: Myron Kim after 1922-2018 . In: Cactus and Succulent Journal . Volume 91, Number 2, Cactus and Succulent Society of America, 2019, pp. 78-101, doi : 10.2985 / 015.091.0202 .

Web links

• Author Post at ipni.org