(7 December 1917 – 13 October 2006)
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Herbarium (NCU) curates a single specimen collected by Frederick Gustav Meyer, but he annotated thousands of our specimens for his treatments of Magnoliaceae and Hamamelidaceae for the Flora of North America. “F. G. Meyer” is his standard author abbreviation as well as how he consistently signed annotation labels.
The title of Meyer’s 1949 doctoral thesis at the Henry Shaw School of Botany at Washington University was “The genus Valeriana in North America and the West Indies”. He is the author of several species of Valeriana, including Valeriana cuatrecasasii F. G. Meyer, V. buxifolia F. G. Meyer, V. amplexicaulis F. G Meyer, V. tenuis F. G. Meyer, and V. punctata F. G. Meyer, all published in “New species of Valeriana from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru” in 1965 in Brittonia 17(2); 112-120.
Patricia Sullivan’s obituary of F. G. Meyers in the Washington Post provides a lively and informative summary of his life and work:
“Frederic G. Meyer, 88, the director of the herbarium at the National Arboretum, who identified the plants that were blooming in the gardens of Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., died of pneumonia Oct. 13 at his home in Silver Spring. He had Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr. Meyer was considered one of the nation’s best taxonomists in identifying cultivated plants, and he researched plants around the world. His main interest was in the classifications and relationships among ornamental plants, but he also became an expert in medieval botany and personally introduced the hereditary material of several thousand plants to the United States. He was the first in modern times to collect the genetic resources of native wild coffee from southern Ethiopia.
In 2002, with archeologist Wilhelmina Jashemski, he co-edited an acclaimed book, “The Natural History of Pompeii.” During six trips to the Italian countryside, they found, in more than 600 excavated garden sites, the remains of whole grapes with seeds intact, chickpeas, chestnuts, lentils and other foods. Some plant material was recovered from large terra cotta jars; other plants were identified from paintings on garden walls. Dr. Meyer and Jashemski tracked down and identified all but one of the plants, a missing link that nagged them.
“One fern, Scolopendrium, appeared so often we were sure that the artist had seen it grown,” Jashemski wrote in an essay for Dr. Meyer’s memorial service last month. “At the end of one day, Fred came back from his collecting with a bag and big smile on his face. He pulled out a beautiful fern about 18 inches high with a long root. . . . He said he knew that the artist had seen it in nature, so he went to the botanical garden in Naples and asked where he could find it growing. They told him to go into the hills around Amalfi until he came to the river and to follow the river until it got shallow enough so he could wade across it. He did just that and found great quantities of the fern.”
Dr. Meyer’s first collection trip, to southern Europe for nine months in 1959, resulted in the identification of 2,800 types of plants. On the second trip, in 1963, he identified and collected an additional 1,200 specimens. The numbers were considered remarkably high at the time. His thoroughness did not surprise Jashemski, who began working with him in 1964.
“If a problem needed to be solved, he stuck with it until he solved it,” she said Saturday. “You knew you were working with a person who knew what he was talking about — and he was extremely pleasant to work with, a very kindly and generous person.”
He lived in a Takoma Park house built in 1887 that had a large garden where he grew plants he had collected during his travels. When Dr. Meyer moved to a retirement community in 2000, he donated more than 23,000 plant specimens and 700 books, some from the 16th century, to the arboretum.
Frederick Gustav Meyer was born Dec. 7, 1917, in Olympia, Wash. He graduated from Washington State University, where he also received a master’s degree in botany in 1941. He paid part of his way through college by playing saxophone in a dance band.
He served in the Army medical corps in Europe during World War II and settled in St. Louis, where he earned a doctorate in botany from Washington University in 1949. He did postdoctoral work at University College in London and then returned to St. Louis to work in the Missouri Botanical Gardens.
He married Lillian “Jean” Nicholson Meyer, a botanical artist who contributed to his works, in 1946. She died in 1983. They had no children, but he is survived by a sister.
In 1956, Dr. Meyer became a research botanist and taxonomist in the New Crops Research Branch at the Department of Agriculture’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. In 1963, he joined the arboretum.
The herbarium doubled in size under Dr. Meyer’s leadership, and he was instrumental in acquiring important collections.
His work was not quickly accomplished. A book on the cultivated woody plants of the southeastern United States took well over 15 years to complete, from research to its 1994 publication. He also labored for 30 years over an updated and translated reproduction of “The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs,” a 16th-century treatise on almost 500 species of plants. He retired in 1991 but continued consulting until 2001.
He received many awards and was a member of many horticultural and botanical organizations, as well as the Cosmos Club, the Explorers Club and National Presbyterian Church.
Although he traveled around the world to find, identify and preserve plants, Dr. Meyer did not need exotic destinations or the dangers of fording rivers to hold his interest. Fellow botanist Elizabeth L. Ley worked with him in the early 1980s on the White House lawn for a project on southeastern cultivated plants.
“Not only would he identify the plants for me, he’d tell me their use and history and give me a biographical sketch of the botanist who discovered and named the plants,” she said. “He did this unfazed, or some might say oblivious, to the snipers who stood on the White House roof to protect the president.””
SOURCE:
Sullivan, Patricia. 2006. Obituary: Frederick Meyer, 88. The Washington Post. November 14, 2006. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2006/11/14/frederick-meyer-88/5079af3c-74b9-43c8-a02f-e352f18513e1/ accessed on 13 December 2022.