Duane Francis Houck

(February 9, 1929 — July 21, 2003)

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Herbarium (NCU) has cataloged approximately 170 specimens collected by Duane F. Houck. His specimens are usually signed “D.F. Houck” and are on labels bearing the title “FLORA OF DEEP RIVER BASIN.” As we continue to catalog our collections more specimens collected by Houck will be identified.

Other herbaria curating vascular plant specimens collected by D. F. Houck include Arizona State University (ASU), Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT:SMU, BRIT:VDB), Carnegie Museum of Natural History (CM), Clemson University (CLEMS), Delta State University (DSC), Georgia Southern University (GAS), Harvard Herbaria (GH), Old Dominion University (ODU), Texas Tech University (TTC), University of Colorado, Boulder (COLO:V), Florida Museum of Natural History (FLAS), University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (ILL), University of Louisiana at Lafayette (LAF), University of Michigan (MICH), University of Mississippi (MISS), University of South Carolina, Columbia (USCH), University of South Florida (USF), University of Southern Mississippi (USMS), University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UCHT), Western Carolina University (WCUH), and University of the South (UOS).

Houck earned a B.A. in 1950 from Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. Most of Houck’s specimens at NCU were collected in 1955-1956 for his Master’s Thesis, “Flood plain flora of the Deep River Triassic Basin,” which he completed in 1956 under the direction of Dr. Al Radford. Houck completed his Ph.D., “Primary phloem regeneration without concomitant xylem regenration: controlling factors in Coleus blumei,” at Iowa State University in 1973.

Duane Francis Houck taught at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee for 21 years. Photograph courtesy of Alumni Relations, Southern Adventist University

Houck taught in the Division of Natural Science at Southern Adventist University in Collegedale, Tennessee for 21 years. He also taught for ten years at Helderberg College in Somerset West, South Africa. Houck was particularly interested in tropical forest conservation, and spent several months each year at the Belize Agroforestry Research Center. He collected plants of southern Belize and established an herbarium emphasizing the ethnobotany of the Maya.

Upon his death in 2003 Duane Houck was survived by his wife, Florence, who lived in Ooltewah, Tennessee.

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The following is from the Tropical Conservation Foundation’s website:
http://www.tcf-barc.org/index.html and http://www.tcf-barc.org/barcgeninfo.htm

Hurricane Iris October 8-9, 2001 in Belize:
Our first priority was recovering the herbarium. For those of you who have not seen it, Duane Houck spent a huge amount of time collecting pressing and cataloging the Flora of Belize. It was several hundred different plants all arranged by family in a professional herbarium cabinet that he drove down from Tennessee. It had been located on the second floor of the main building and now was somewhere under several feet of wood and thatch rubble.
It took us most of the first day to clear enough wood out of the way to get to the herbarium.
It had been swept off the second floor, landed hard on its bottom and then absorbed the weight of the building falling on top of it. It was lying on its back which meant that water was getting inside of it and soaking the specimens and books stored inside. We pulled it to safety and then began the three day long task of laying out the hundreds of pages in the sun to dry. Because the cabinet was almost upside down, the damage was pretty much reserved to the families higher in the alphabetical order. The A’s and B’s were severely damaged. The Compositaceae, the largest family, had extensive damage. The D’s through F’s had some damage, mostly water stains at the top of the page. Some of the Flora of Guatemala books had some water damage, otherwise the collection was saved. The cabinet itself got pretty bent up, but a lot of pounding got it to the point where the door would close. We dried everything out and carried it to the second floor of the new building. So, the collection was saved and is quite useable.

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PUBLICATIONS (incomplete list):
Houck, Duane F. and Loren H. Rieseberg (1983) Hormonal regulation of epiphyllous bud release in Bryophyllum calycinum. BioScience 33(10): 656-657.
Houck, Duane F. and Loren H. Rieseberg (1983 ) Hormonal regulation of epiphyllous bud release and development in Bryophyllum calycinum. American Journal of Botany 70(6): 912-915.
Houck, Duane F. and Clifford E. LaMotte (1977) Primary phloem regeneration without concomitant xylem regeneration: its hormone control in Coleus. Amer. J. Bot. 64(7): 799-809.
Houck, Duane R. (1973) Primary phloem regeneration without concomitant xylem regeneration: controlling factors in Coleus. Iowa State University, Ph.D. Thesis.
Houck, Duane F. (1956) Flood plain flora of the Deep River Triassic Basin. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Masters Thesis.

Duane Francis Houck (1929-2003) earned his Masters Degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1956. The title of his thesis was “Flood plain flora of the Deep River Triassic Basin”.