My recollections of A.E. Radford
Steve Leonard
April 14, 2006
From January 1968 until the end of 1971 I
was privileged to be employed by the University as Herbarium Curator—a
position handed to me by Dr. Radford—and I never knew what
happened behind the scenes to make it happen. The Herbarium was
already well along on the Carolinas exchange program with 105 participating
institutions when I got there. Later we expanded to 125 and then
135. As a result the place was busy with boxes arriving and boxes
being sent out all over the world. Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Harper were
the two principal part-time employees with incoming specimens. Nancy
Clark and Betty Hall were two of the administrative secretarial
people whom I recall, and we had a long list of undergraduate and
graduate student assistants.
But this account is not about students or
herbarium workers but about the Man, himself and some of my recollections
from numerous field trips into various parts of the Carolinas. My
introduction into the Radford modus operandi occurred
in the fall of 1967 when I was invited to accompany John Bozeman
and Radford on a collecting trip to lower South Carolina. I knew
almost no plants so I had to pick up as much instruction as possible
along the way. One of our first stops was at a pond behind some
church in upper South Carolina and I was told to gather specimens
of a grass growing in the edge of the lake. As carefully as I could,
I squatted along the bank and reached out as far as possible to
snatch stems of my quarry, being careful not to get wet! In a few
moments I looked up at the sound of great splashing to see Radford
wading along the margin of the pond, knee-deep in water while concentrating
in his methodical manner on all species visible and some no doubt
he expected to find. I thought if it is okay for him to get wet,
then it is okay for me, and from that day onward—even to this—I
rarely wear boots, and will plunge in, Radford fashion, if it is
not over my head. When the three day field trip had ended and all
of our collections were pressed, the three of us had gathered 4,607
specimens for exchange.
I haven’t done it but I could go back
through my accession books to see how many trips the two of us made.
Sometimes a graduate student would go with us but the best trips
were those when he and I were alone. I learned the knack of driving
with one eye focused on the highway and the other focused on the
roadside plants. We could travel mile after mile with never a word
said. In the early days I waited for him to issue the “Stop”
command but eventually I gained enough confidence to stop on my
own when something stuck out of the roadside flora or when an interesting
place was spotted. We always started our days promptly at 7AM, spent
as little time as possible for lunch if we ate at all, and collected
until dark. If it rained, we got wet. At nightfall we hunted for
the standard Holiday Inn ($14/night for a room with two double beds)
and a local eatery.
One of our most remarkable field trips coincided
with a minor hurricane off the coast of South Carolina. From the
time we crossed into South Carolina it rained and rained and rained
some more. We stowed our wet clothes in our standard military rubberized
laundry bags that were used for packing the bundles of collections.
The next day on one of the coastal islands near Charleston during
an absolute monsoonal deluge, we collected the wonderful beach primrose,
Oenothera drummondii, with its huge yellow flowers.
Dripping with water we decided to change back into our clothes of
the previous day that were damp though not wringing wet. In the
humidity and heat, they had soured. But they were less wet than
what we were wearing, so we changed right there in front of the
disbelieving world, and spent the rest of our smelly journey with
the heater on and the windows down!
There were very few times when Radford revealed
anything of his early years or his private life. On one occasion
when we lodged in Edgefield, South Carolina he told me about his
high school years of playing baseball in Edgefield and how his family
had moved frequently (17 times by the time he had finished high
school). It may have been on that occasion that he told me about
his brothers and sisters—there were nine altogether—and
seven earned Ph.D. degrees. He never discussed his military career,
and never elaborated on family matters. I suppose such focus and
mental discipline came from his determination to succeed or from
his military indoctrination. The only time I ever heard him utter
a profane word was when he was quoting one of his teachers, Professor
Roland Totten. I guess the story is worth telling.
Dr. Totten had an interest in giant trees
of each species but harbored a fear of snakes. On one of his field
trips into the swamp of the Roanoke River at the head of Albemarle
Sound in eastern North Carolina where a huge bald cypress supposedly
grew, Dr. Totten was leading his small class of students when all
at once he encountered a large coiled rattlesnake on the bank of
a small stream in a canebreak thicket. At the sight of the serpent,
Dr. Totten uttered an irreverential “Great god a-mighty!”
and jumped straight up, almost landing on the snake when he came
down, according to Radford who chuckled over recalling Dr. Totten’s
dilemma.
One piece of advice—a warning—Radford
left with me characterizes the man in a special way. He said if
you are going to do something, get at least 40 percent of it done
before you announce what you are doing. He was both a realist
and an idealist. He was acquainted with unprofessionalism in botany
having himself been burned, but he looked for the positive—the
potential in an individual. He gave me the benefit of the doubt
and for that I am grateful.
Steve Leonard
PO Box 310
Wiggins, MS 39577
Photograph ca. 1974 by Laurie Stewart Radford: University
of North Carolina botany class field trip to Dolly Sods, West Virginia.
Dr. Al Radford is in the center, wearing baseball cap. If anyone
recognizes the students, please email mccormick@unc.edu so we can
add their names to this caption.
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Memories Dr. A. E. Radford and of “Radford”
L. L. Gaddy
May 1, 2006
I have tucked under a pile of books on the
bottom shelf of an old bookcase my first copy of Manual of the
Vascular Flora of the Carolinas, by A. E. Radford, H. E. Ahles,
and C. R. Bell. I bought it in 1971 or so for just over ten dollars.
It originally had a green hardcover (the newer editions have a purple
cover). The cover illustration was the Venus flytrap, a Carolina
endemic and one of the world’s most famous (or “wonderful,”
as Darwin put it) plants. Dalibarda repens is now on the
cover (I really don’t know why). My first copy is now coverless
and is falling apart. I keep it for the memories of my early botanical
years.
The manual was generally referred to as “Radford,”
people having dropped the Ahles and Bell—out of convenience,
not disrespect for these two junior authors. “Radford”
was (and still is) quoted like the botanical bible of the Carolinas.
“Radford says….this…, Radford says…that…,
Radford has Viola tripartita from Macon County, Radford
claims Ludwigia linifolia is rare, and Radford says Actaea
pachypoda is found in rich woods (whatever that means).”
This book sometimes seemed more real than Nature herself. We, the
young botanists of the seventies, would often check “Radford”
to see if the plants were growing where they were supposed to grow…and,
most of the time, they were. Albert Radford died last month in Missouri
at the age of 88. In his 1183-page manual and now in his death,
he became and has become greater than himself—as W. H. Auden
said of W. B. Yeats after the passing of the latter, “he became
his admirers.”
Dr. Albert E. Radford was born in Augusta,
Georgia in 1918. He attended Furman University and later became
Professor of Botany at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. Radford the man was large in stature and had a gravelly, somewhat
high-pitched southern voice. He was always willing to dispense good
botanical advice to those who accompanied him on his field excursions
throughout the Carolinas. In his office in Chapel Hill, he often
seemed preoccupied and grouchy, as are most field botanists when
in office captivity. In the field, however, he seemed to be a different
person. In the eighties, I remember once driving the old Panther
Creek Road (on the GA-SC line) on Easter Sunday in an open-air jeep.
A white van filled with students pulled up beside me on the dirt
road; the driver, dressed in khaki, looked me straight in the eye
with a knowing smile. It was Dr. Radford, pursuing his religion,
in that holiest of sanctuaries, the southern Appalachians.
I am sure Dr. Radford was proud of the manual,
which was often criticized as having many errors, but, in the long
run, was generally recognized as one of the best, if not the best,
regional floras in the country. He was also proud of his discovery
of a bluff on Stevens Creek near Clarks Hill in South Carolina.
Here, he had found a one-of-kind relict Pleistocene plant community
with numerous state and regional floristic records. Radford was
also a student of the sedge genus Carex and was ahead of
his time in understanding the complexities of Carex ecology.
Dr. Radford inspired many field botanists and produced outstanding
students, many of whom are now teachers or herbarium curators (former
students of his are on the editorial board of both Flora of
North America and Flora of China !). In his final
university years, he spent time working on the natural areas of
the southeastern United States and discussing methodologies with
which to document such areas. His concept of “ecosystematics,”
refined in Vascular Plant Systematics, was original and
complex, and strongly influenced numerous southeastern botanists,
including myself.
In the seventies, I had asked Dr. Radford
about unexplored areas in the southern Appalachians. He told me
about the Brevard Belt, its complex geologic structure, and its
undocumented flora. Years later when I found a new species of Carex
endemic to the Brevard Belt of Georgia, South Carolina, and North
Carolina (it only took ten years to describe it and get it published),
I named it Carex radfordii in honor of the man who told
me where to look.
L. L. Gaddy
terra incognita
125 South Edisto Avenue
Columbia, South Carolina 29205
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Jay Kranyik's photograph of
his well-used Manual, in use in Dupont Forest.
Jay adds, "I have pictures of Botanists glued to the inside
covers of my Radford
(sometimes when I need some help, I lay my palm on their picture
and channel their wisdom). " May, 2006.
Jay Kranyik
Botanical Gardens of Asheville
Asheville, North Carolina
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"Dr. Al" and Conservation
J. Dan Pittillo
18 May 2006
Dr. Albert E. Radford is perhaps
he is best known for his contribution to botanical knowledge that
began with the Flora of the Carolinas project. The team
of University of North Carolina botanists included several students
that received their masters degrees by compiling floras of various
counties. After only a decade this project resulted in two publications.
He, along with Harry E. Ahles and C. Ritchie Bell, published the
Guide to the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas in
1964, with the subsequent publication of the Atlas of the
Vascular Flora of the Carolinas in 1965. I had the privilege
to join this group in my last two years of high school, submitting
a collection from Henderson County, NC. The final product of this
ground-breaking effort was the well known Manual of the
Vascular Flora of the Carolinas in 1968, complete with
county records for which collections were either made or documented
from other herbaria.
What many people do not realize is that
Dr. Radford was a key player in the establishment of the Natural
Heritage Program for North Carolina. This effort began in 1976 with
then Governor Holzhouser's appointment of the committee under the
guidance of The Nature Conservancy. Dr. Al, as we fondly called
him, insisted that we make this program a line-item budgeted by
the State, and it has resulted in perhaps the best Natural Heritage
Program in the Southeast.
For Dr. Al's tireless efforts we can all
be grateful that we not only have a fine reference for identifying
the plants of the Carolinas, but we also have a program that helps
protect the habitats for this flora as well.
J. Dan Pittillo
675 Cane Creek Road
Sylva, North Carolina 28779
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