Richard William George Dennis

Richard William George Dennis (* 13. July 1910 in Thornbury , Gloucestershire , † 7. June 2003 ) was an English botanist ( mycology , plant pathology ) and specializes in the sac fungi (Ascomycota). Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Dennis ".

Life

Dennis studied history and then botany and geology at the University of Bristol with a degree in 1930. He then went to the West of Scotland Agricultural College in Glasgow and received his doctorate in 1934 at the University of Glasgow on oat diseases. In 1937 he went to the plant virus research station in Cambridge and studied potato diseases. In 1939 he became a plant pathologist at the Seed Test Station in East Craigs, Edinburgh. From 1944 he was in the Botanical Garden in Kew , where he took over the mushrooms department in 1951 (as the successor to Elsie Maud Wakefield ). In 1975 he retired, but remained scientifically active.

In 1941 he was on a research trip to Trinidad, in 1958 in Venezuela and in 1975 he collected in the Azores, each of which led to mycological publications. He also collected a lot in the Hebrides.

He was the first to describe a number of new mushroom species and 40 species of mushrooms and 5 genera were named after him. He often used his own watercolor illustrations of mushrooms in his books.

Fonts

• with PD Orton, FB Hora :. New checklist of British agarics and boleti, Supplement to Transactions of the British Mycological Society 1960 (expansion of the checklist with AA Pearson 1948)
• British Cup Fungi and their Allies: an introduction to the Ascomycetes, Ray Society 1960 (later reissued as British Ascomycetes)
• Fungus flora of Venezuela and adjacent countries. London: HMSO 1970
• British Ascomycetes. Vaduz: J. Cramer 1978, 1981
• Fungi of the Hebrides. Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens 1986
• Fungi of South East England. Kew: Royal Botanic Gardens 1995
• with EM Wakefield: Common British Fungi. London: Gawthorn 1950

Web links

• Obituary in The Guardian (English)