Susan Adams McKelvey

Susan Adams Delano McKelvey (born Susan Magoun Delano; born March 13, 1883 in Philadelphia , † July 11, 1964 in Boston ) was an American botanist . Your official botanical author abbreviation is " McKelvey ". She was the sister of the architect William Adams Delano (1874-1960) and a cousin of the American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt .

Live and act

Susan Adams Delano, as she herself wanted to be called, was the fifth child of the merchant and banker Eugene Delano and Susan Magoun Adams Delano. As a child, she moved to New York City with her parents . From 1906 to 1907 she went to Bryn Mawr College . On October 8, 1907, she married the lawyer Charles Wylie McKelvey (1878-1957) and moved with him to property in Oyster Bay on Long Island . They had two sons together, one of whom died in 1916. Problems grew more and more in their marriage. To avoid this and to dare to start over, she moved to Boston in 1919 . Their official divorce didn't take place until 1930.

Upon arriving in Boston, McKelvey called on Charles Sprague Sargent because she wanted to volunteer at the Arnold Arboretum . To test her resolve, Sargent sent her first to wash clay pots. Under the guidance of William Henry Judd (1888-1946) she finally began to study the plants growing in the arboretum and to learn the basics of botany .

With John George Jack (1861-1949) McKelvey took part in their first botanical collecting trip from August to September 1921, which took them to Glacier Bay National Park . In July of the next year she traveled with him in the territory of the White Mountains in New Hampshire . On her return she worked on the collected plant material and in March 1923 sent a selection to Alice Eastwood (1859-1953) in California , with whom she later became a close friend.

On Sargent's advice, McKelvey began to study the genus Syringa , the lilac . The monograph on the genus, published in 1928, was her first extensive botanical publication and is dedicated to the recently deceased Charles Sprague Sargent. In 1931 she became a research assistant at the Arnold Arboretum.

In October 1928 McKelvey went on their first excursions to the southwest of the United States together with Alice Eastwood . By 1936, seven more followed, in which she examined the palm lilies ( yucca ) and related genera growing in the US states of Arizona , Nevada , New Mexico , Utah , Colorado , Texas , Oklahoma and California . She sent samples of the collected plant material to William Trelease and Nathaniel Lord Britton . In 1937 she worked on her book Yuccas of the South Western United States , the first volume of which appeared in mid-1938. She completed the manuscript for the second volume in 1943. However, its publication was delayed until 1947.

In 1944 McKelvey began to deal with the botanical exploration of the area west of the Mississippi and published her third and last book about it in 1956.

McKelvey died in 1964 at the age of 81 and left her botanical collection to the Arnold Arboretum.

Honors

• Centennial Gold Medal of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society
• Schaffer Medal from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society
• Emily Renwick Achievement Medal from the Garden Club of America
• Sara Gildersleeve Fife Memorial Award from the New York Botanical Garden

bibliography

Works

• The Lilac: A Monograph . MacMillan, New York 1928
• Yuccas of the South Western United States . 2 volumes, The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Jamaica Plain, Mass. 1938 and 1947
• Botanical Exploration of the Trans-Mississippi West 1790-1850 . Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, Jamaica Plain, Mass. 1956

Magazine articles

• Syringa rugulosa, a new species from western China . In: Journal of the Arnold Arboretum . Volume 6, No. 3, 1925, pp. 153-154
• A new hybrid lilac . In: Horticulture . Volume 5, No. 15, 1927, p. 302
• A white pine blister rust demonstration . In: Horticulture . Volume 10, No. 18, 1932, p. 331
• Taxonomic and cytological relationships of Yucca and Agave . In: Journal of the Arnold Arboretum . Volume 14, No. 1, 1933, pp. 76-81 (with Karl Sax)
• Arctomecon californicum . In: National Horticultural Magazine . Volume 13, No. 4, 1934, pp. 349-350
• A verification of the occurrence of Yucca Whipplei in Arizona . In: Journal of the Arnold Arboretum . Volume 15, No. 4, 1934, pp. 350-352
• Notes on yucca . In: Journal of the Arnold Arboretum . Volume 16, No. 2, 1935, pp. 268-271
• The Arnold Arboretum . In: Harvard Alumni Bulletin . Volume 38, No. 15, 1936, pp. 464-472
• A new Agave from Arizona . In: Journal of the Arnold Arboretum . Volume 30, No. 3, 1949, pp. 227-230
• A discussion of the Pacific Railroad report as issued in the quarter edition . In: Journal of the Arnold Arboretum . Volume 40, No. 1, 1959, pp. 38-67

swell

• Edmund A. Schofield: A Life Redeemed: Susan Delano McKelvey and the Arnold Arboretum . In: Arnoldia . Volume 47, No. 4, 1987, pp. 9-23 online (PDF; 1.3 MB)

Web links

• Author entry and list of described plant names for Susan Adams McKelvey at the IPNI