Walter Tennyson Swingle

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Walter Tennyson Swingle (born January 8, 1871 in Canaan Township (Pennsylvania) , † January 19, 1952 in Washington, DC ) was an American botanist . Its official botanical author abbreviation is " Swingle ".

Live and act

Swingle was born in 1871 in Canaan Township in Wayne County, Pennsylvania, the first child of John Fletcher Swingle (1848-1935) and Mary Astley Swingle . In 1873 the family moved to Manhattan, Kansas , where they ran a farm nearby. At first, Swingle was homeschooled instead of going to school. He taught himself plant names using a copy of Asa Gray's A Manual of the Botany of the Northern United States .

In 1885 Swingle began studying at the Kansas State Agricultural College in Topeka, Kansas . At the age of 16 he was already writing a treatise on rust fungi on cereal crops in 1887 . From 1888 to April 1891 Swingle was appointed assistant botanist at the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station . In 1890 he received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Kansas State College of Agriculture at Manhattan . In April 1891 he had already published 21 joint works with Professor William A. Kellerman and 6 of his own.

Swingle moved to Washington, DC in late April 1891 to work at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the new Vegetable Pathology department headed by Beverly T. Galloway. He was originally employed to work on citrus fruits on a fungus pest; However, his interest quickly shifted to the citrus plants ( Citrus ) themselves. His research work was mainly carried out in Florida. He researched genetics and hybridization in citrus plants; he produced the hybrid varieties ' Minneola ', the Tangelo varieties 'Sampson' (1897), 'Thornton' (1899) and 'Orlando' (1911), as well as three Limequat varieties (1909); he was also involved in the development of other citrus fruits such as the Murcott orange and kumquat varieties.

From 1895 to 1896 he studied with Eduard Strasburger at the University of Bonn . During another visit to Europe in 1898, he studied again with Strasburger; this time he attended the University of Leipzig ; During this stay he met his future wife Lucie A. Romstaedt. In 1901 he married Lucie A. Romstaedt, who died in 1910. In 1915 he married Maude Kellerman, the daughter of the co-author of some of his works, William A. Kellerman. From this marriage there were four children. His half-brother Charles Fletcher Swingle (1899–1978) was also a botanist.

In 1899 he conducted research on figs in Naples and published research on the culture of figs and dates. In 1900 Swingle brought 405 specimens of the cultivars 'Deglet Noor' and 'Rhars' from date palms from a trip to Algeria. These were planted in Tempe, Arizona , but died later. Swingle successfully introduced fig wasps of the genus Blastophaga from Algeria as a pollinator for the fig plantations in California. In 1907 he helped set up the United States Date Garden in Indio, California .

Through his interest in citrus plants, he also got to work intensively on Chinese botany. He procured over 100,000 Chinese books for the Library of Congress and set up a personal library on Chinese agriculture. His materials are now housed in the Walter Tennyson Swingle Collection at the University of Miami .

In January 1941 Swingle retired. He became an advisor to the University of Miami for the botany of tropical plants and head of the Swingle Plant Research Laboratory there . After Swingle fell ill in mid-1951, he died on January 19, 1952 at home in Washington, DC

Honors

In 1896 Swingle received a Master of Science degree from Kansas State Agricultural College. In 1922 Swingle received a Ph.D. from Kansas State Agricultural College. The genus Swinglea Merr. from the diamond family (Rutaceae) has been named after him.

Works

Here is a selection of his works:

  • Some Peronosporaceae in the Herbarium of the Division of Vegetable Pathology . In: Journal of Mycology . tape 7 , no. 2 , 1892, p. 109-130 .
  • The Grain Smuts: How they are caused and how to prevent them . In: USDA Farmer Bulletin . tape 75 . Washington 1898 (20 pages, 8 illustrations).
  • A new genus, Fortunella, comprising four species of Kumquat Oranges . In: Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences . tape 5 , 1915.
  • Textbook of systematic botany . 1928.
  • Noteworthy Chinese works on wild and cultivated food plants. Report of the Librarian of Congress for the year 1935 . Washington, DC 1935, p. 193-206 .
  • The botany of citrus and its wild relatives of the orange subfamily . In: HJ Webber, LD Batchelor (Ed.): The Citrus Industry i History, Botany, and Breeding . Univ of California Press, Berkeley 1943, pp. 129-474 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 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 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Swingle, Walter Tennyson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American botanist
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Canaan, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 1952
Place of death Washington, DC