Arthur Cronquist records

Arthur Cronquist (1919-1992), an internationally recognized leader in the field of plant systematics, spent the most productive years of his professional career at the New York Botanical Garden (1943-1946; 1952-1992). Highly experienced in botanical fieldwork and floristic studies, Cronquist was also a formidable synthetic thinker whose contributions to systematic botany have been widely adopted by botanists and plant taxonomists. His two works, The Evolution and Classification of Flowering Plants (1988, 2nd ed.) and An Integrated System of Classification of Flowering Plants (1981) are his culminating studies of summary paradigms of angiosperm classification and taxonomy that are consulted and respected worldwide.

Arthur Cronquist was born 19 March 1919 in San Jose, California. His boyhood was spent in Portland, Oregon and in Pocatello, Idaho where he became interested in the natural history of the mountain regions of the west. He entered the University of Idaho (now Idaho State University) where Professor Ray J. Davis became an influential mentor. He gained a B.S. (1938) and M.S. (1940) from Utah State University. Here he met Dr. Bassett Maguire who directed his course of study on the Aster foliaceus complex and later became a colleague at the NYBG. Cronquist gained his Ph.D. (1944) at the University of Minnesota under Dr. C. O. Rosenthal.

For short periods Cronquist held positions as professor of botany at the University of Georgia (1946-1948) and at Washington State University (1948-1951). At the NYBG Henry A. Gleason nurtured his interest in floristics, leading to a collaboration between the two men that resulted in publications that remain botanical classics to this day. The first was Gleason's New Britton & Brown Illustrated Flora (1952) to which Cronquist contributed the section on the Asteraceae; the second was their Manual of Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada (1963) known to botany students as "the Green Bible." The manual is an encyclopedic reference and field book whose intellectual genealogy can be traced to Nathaniel Lord Britton and Addison Brown's original Illustrated Flora of 1896-1898. A third co-authorship with Henry Gleason was The Natural Geography of Plants (1964).

Through his career Cronquist conducted fieldwork throughout North America, with a concentration on the study and collection of plants of the intermountain regions of the western United States. These studies resulted in the publication of Intermountain Flora (1972, volume one), co-authored with Arthur H. Holmgren, Noel H. Holmgren, and James L. Reveal. Cronquist was an authority on the family Compositae and authored three textbooks on introductory botany. In the later 1950s he began a correspondence and collaboration with the Armenian botanist, Armen Takhtajan, of the Komarov Institute in Leningrad, U.S.S.R. His work with Takhtajan and associate biologists at the Komarov proved a critical stimulus in the development of his synthetic projects in general botanic systems. In his association and friendship with Takhtajan Cronquist studied and became proficient in the Russian language, visited the (then) Soviet Union on several occasions, and promoted scientific exchanges between the two countries.

As Director of Botany (1971-74) and Senior Scientist (1974-92) Cronquist carried important administrative duties at the NYBG and at its satellite facility, the Cary Arboretum. During this time he also held faculty appointments at Columbia University and the City University of New York, where he served on the Executive Committee on Biology. His many professional affiliations included the American Society of Plant Taxonomists (president, 1962), the Botanical Society of America (president, 1973), the International Association of for Plant Taxonomy (council member), and the Torrey Botanical Club (president, 1976). Professional awards and honors included the Leidy Medal of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia (1970), honorary vice-president, XII International Botanical Congress, Leningrad (1975), the Asa Gray Award (ASPT, 1985), and the Medal for Botany, Linnean Society of London (1986).

Arthur Cronquist was known for his towering physical stature, tall tales, and congeniality as well as for his commanding position as a botanist and educator. His advancement of taxonomy, plant systematics, and floristics figures as an achievement of lasting significance for the science of botany. He died 22 March 1992 while studying plant specimens in the herbarium of the Brigham Young University in Utah.