Ivan M. Johnston's Studies in the Boraginaceae /James S. Miller, Mary Sue Taylor & Erin Rempala.

2005·9.6 MB·English

by  Miller, James S.

(van M. Johnston's
Studies
IN THE
Bovginaceae
Tournefortia delicatula J. S. Miller. Reprinted from Novon 7(3): 266.1997.
M.
(van Johnston's
Studies
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James S. Miller
Mara Sue "lau or
& E~ ri'n Rempa
MlSSOU Rl
Botanical
Garden
Press
MONOGRAPHS IN SYSTEMATIC BOTANY
FROM THE MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN
Volume 101
ISBN 1-930723-44-X
ISSN 0161-1542
Authors’ Addresses
James S. Miller
Missouri Botanical Garden
P.O. Box 299
St. Louis, Missouri 63166-0299, U.S.A.
Mary Sue Taylor
732 E. Clinton Ave.
Fresno, Claifomia 93704, U.S.A.
Erin Rempala
3790 Florida St. #AL09
San Diego, California 92104, U.S.A.
Scientific Editor and Head
Victoria C. Hollo well
Managing Editor
Amy McPherson
Associate Editor
Diana Gunter
Text Formatter
Barbara Mack
MBG Press Assistant
Kevin Brown
Copyright © 2005 by Missouri Botanical Garden Press.
P.O. Box 299
St. Louis, Missouri 63166-0299, U.S.A.
All rights reserved.
Printed in U.S.A.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface. 1
Introduction. 2
IVAN MURRAY JOHNSTON’S RESEARCH CAREER. 2
IVAN M. JOHNSTON’S PUBLICATIONS ON BORAGINACEAE. 12
INDEX TO THE “STUDIES IN THE BORAGINACEAE” . 14
LITERATURE CITED . 15
A CATALOG OF THE CORRESPONDENCE OF IVAN M. JOHNSTON. 19
An Index to the Botanical Names Treated in Ivan M. Johnston’s
“Studies in the Boraginaceae”. 24
APPENDICES
Appendix 1. Publications of Ivan M. Johnston . 95
Appendix 2. Types of Ivan M. Johnston by Binomial. 100
Appendix 3. Types of Ivan M. Johnston by Collector 121

Preface
During his 38-year career at Harvard University, Ivan Murray Johnston focused his research on the
systematics of Boraginaceae, and his results were largely published in a series of 31 journal articles
entitled “Studies in the Boraginaceae.” These appeared as a numbered series between 1923 and 1961,
with subtitles giving some indication of the subject matter presented, yet all but one lacked an index to
the taxa that were treated. Cumulatively they represent an enormous contribution to our present
understanding of the taxonomy of the Boraginaceae, but the format in which they were published
makes it difficult to access the information easily. The present contribution is an index to the botanical
names in Johnston’s “Studies in the Boraginaceae.” Introductory material discusses Johnston’s career,
including his other research interests, but this volume is not intended to be a complete history of his
life and accomplishments. An explanation of how the index was prepared, a complete list of all of
Johnston’s research publications, and indices to the type specimens of names published by Johnston
are also provided.
This project grew out of a personal effort by the first author to index Johnston’s publications as a
tool for further monographic studies on the Boraginaceae. The suggestion to revise and publish this
came from many people, but Joan Nowicke, Michael Frohlich, and Harald Riedl were especially
encouraging. Checking the numerous references, standardizing abbreviations for authorities, and
assembling information about Johnston’s life, the names he published, and the types of the names that
he published were time-consuming and often tedious tasks that could not have been completed
without the two coauthors. Sue Taylor helped proofread and check all of the index entries and
assembled the appendices cataloging Johnston’s names, types, and publications, and Erin Rempala did
the majority of the work standardizing author citations, many of which required consulting the original
literature to resolve ambiguous citations. Several other colleagues at the Missouri Botanical Garden
assisted either in finding or photocopying additional research materials. The authors would like to
especially thank Roy Cummings and Heidi Schmidt for their assistance.
Emily Wood and the staff of the Harvard University Botanical Libraries, particularly Sheila Conner
of the Arnold Arboretum, helped find Johnston’s correspondence that remains at Harvard. Following
his death, Johnston’s research materials were destined for the Texas Research Foundation, which was
dissolved in 1972. While some available correspondence provides a bit of information, the final
disposition of Johnston’s correspondence and field books remains a mystery. John Kirkpatrick, of the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, helped locate
Johnston’s correspondence with Donovan Correll. Billie Turner willingly provided access to his
personal correspondence with Johnston. Barney Lipscomb provided assistance at BRIT, and Larry
Sail, of the University of Texas at Dallas, helped confirm that none of Johnston’s material had ended up
there with Lundell. Finally, this whole project benefited tremendously from assistance from the library
staff at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Martha Riley and Doug Holland helped find archival materials.
Teri-Ann Wallace helped obtain materials through inter-library loan, and Linda Oestry helped locate
necessary references. As the project was concluded, Joseph Ewan discussed much of the history
surrounding Johnston’s career and helped place his actions in the context of the botanical community
at the time. His advice added greatly to the work.
1
2 Miller, Taylor & Rempala
Introduction
No single botanist has had as great an impact on our present state of knowledge of the systematics
of Boraginaceae as Ivan Murray Johnston. The family was his primary research interest during his 38-
year career at Harvard University. In addition to his contributions to our present understanding of
relationships and classification, he published 215 new names in the family, accounting for about 10%
of the presently recognized species. Only the combined efforts of Augustin Pyramus and Alphonso de
Candolle in the Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis (de Candolle, 1845, 1846), where
they published more than 350 species and nearly 500 new taxa of Boraginaceae, could attempt to claim
a larger number, but their work is much less detailed, a much smaller percentage of their species are
accepted by modem authors, and their classification was much less refined than that of Johnston.
Although Johnston focused intensively on Boraginaceae, his interests were broad and covered
many subjects, perhaps best described in his own words in a letter dated 10 June 1957 to an old friend
in California:
“I am, as you may know, a systematic botanist with a monographic interest in the family
Boraginaceae, and a general interest in plants of Latin America. Before the war I was working on
the flora of the intermontane states of northern Mexico (those south of Texas and New Mexico)
and since then have been working in Panama and for a time of the flora of southeastern Asia.
My love of desert plants and floras still persists but of late I seem to have been occupied most
of the time with the analysis of tropical forests for the Army.”
While a great deal can be learned of Johnston’s research interests through his publications, the
more personal side of his life is a bit more difficult to follow. His last 10 years at Harvard were not
happy ones, as he became embittered over the merging of the Arnold Arboretum and Gray Herbarium
libraries and herbaria. Shortly before his death, he had decided to move to the Texas Research
Foundation. His science library, presumably containing the major part of his correspondence and his
field books, was to become part of the library of the Texas Research Foundation (Cornell, 1961). The
foundation closed on the first of September 1972 and the herbarium and library were transferred to the
University of Texas, Austin (Turner, 1973), but Johnston’s materials either never made it to the
foundation or they were separated and lost when the foundation was dissolved.
Ivan Murray johnston’s research career
Ivan Murray Johnston was bom on February 28, 1898, in Los Angeles, California, where his
parents, William Murray Johnston, a locally prominent physician, and Etta Farnsworth Johnston, had
emigrated in 1895. He attended public school in Los Angeles and began collecting plants in southern
California as a high school student. He roamed the area where he lived and collected along streams and
the coast. He later wrote to botanist and botanical historian Joseph Ewan that “I was bom on Pico
Street and used to go swimming just beyond Western Ave. not to mention stealing watermelons near
Brea pits.” His affection for the area lasted his entire life, and he later lamented the unique biological
environments that had been destroyed by development in the Los Angles area. His specimens were
pressed and labeled with a great deal of care, and this interest in specimen quality was later a frequent
topic in his correspondence and publications. He began corresponding with botanists at nearby
universities, and also in other parts of the country, before he began college. Much of this
correspondence would result in life-long professional relationships.
In 1916, Johnston began his undergraduate studies at Pomona College, in Claremont, California,
where he studied botany with Philip Munz and began building his relationships with the major figures
in botanical research in California at the time (Munz, 1961). He transferred to the University of
I. M. Johnston’s “Studies in the Boraginaceae” 3
California at Berkeley in 1918 and received his A.B. degree with Highest Honors in Botany in 1920. He
continued his studies at Berkeley and received his M.A. in 1922. During the summers of 1919, 1920, and
1922, he also kept botanically busy working at the Pike’s Peak alpine laboratory of the Carnegie
Institution with F. E. Clements and Harvey M. Hall (Howard, 1961; Munz, 1961).
From mid April to mid July 1921, Johnston took a leave from his master’s studies and served as the
botanical collector on the California Academy of Sciences expedition to the Gulf of California. As was
to characterize his work throughout his career, Johnston returned home from his trip and published a
233-page article only three years later. His published account (Johnston, 1924c) is an excellent example
of his ability to incorporate geological, geographical, and climatalogical information into his
understanding of species. His introduction provides an excellent review of the physical features and
geology of the region. During the trip, Johnston made about 1500 collections on 30 islands in the Gulf,
5 sites in Sonora, and 14 localities on mainland Baja California (Johnston, 1924c). The collection
represented approximately 300 species, of which about 50 were new to science (Evermann, 1921). Then-
director of the museum at the California Academy of Sciences, B. W. Evermann, wrote in his Director’s
Report for 1921, “Specialists who have examined some of the groups assert that, in spite of the fact that
the time when the collecting was done was the most unfavorable of the year, it is the best collection
ever made in that little explored region.” In addition to his collections of vascular plants, Johnston kept
a separate number series for the marine algae, which he also collected. William Albert Setchell and
Nathan Lyon Gardner (1924) described 60 new species from his collections, 14 of them named after him
(Table 1).
During both high school and his undergraduate college years, Johnston developed professional
relationships with the prominent botanists in California, and also with botanists in other parts of the
country. One of those who most influenced Johnston was J. Francis Macbride, then at the Gray
Herbarium at Harvard (later at the Field Museum in Chicago). Johnston had expressed his opinion to
Macbride as early as 1918 that some of the Boraginaceae of the American Southwest were in dire need
of study; it was Macbride’s suggestion that Johnston continue with his graduate studies at Harvard
(Howard, 1961; Mangelsdorf et al., 1961).
Johnston moved to the East Coast to begin doctoral studies at Harvard under the direction of B. L.
Robinson in the fall of 1922. He received his doctorate in 1925 following approval of his dissertation by
his graduate committee of Robinson, Oakes Ames, and Merrit L. Femald. His thesis, entitled “The
North American Species of Cryptantha,” was published as the fourth article in his “Studies in the
Boraginaceae” (Johnston, 1925a).
With the encouragement of Robinson, Johnston was awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship,
which allowed him to travel to and conduct fieldwork in Chile from 1 October 1925 to 31 May 1926.
During this trip he developed a series of friendships that lasted his entire life; the respect his South
American colleagues held for him is evidenced by the number of memorial articles published following
his death (Ferreyra, 1960; Looser, 1961; Ruiz Leal, 1961). Both his guide to the preparation of botanical
specimens for the herbarium (Johnston, 1939c) and his article “The floristic significance of shrubs
common to North and South American deserts” (Johnston, 1940c) were re-published in Spanish
(Johnston, 1941c, 194 Id).
On 18 and 19 October 1925, Johnston collected the extraordinarily dry Nitrate Coast of northern
Chile during an unusually wet year for the region. He gathered 86 collections in the region, 52 from a
steep quebrada north of Tocopilla and 34 from the base of the hills north of Antofagasta. Between 28
October and 10 January, Johnston made 930 collections in the northern provinces of Chanaral and
Taltal (Johnston, 1929c), which were the basis of his 137-page publication on the region three years
after his fieldwork. While he collected wherever he could, he seemed particularly interested in the
vegetation regularly covered by sea-fog, from altitudes of 300 to 800 m, between Barquito and Paposo.
Many of the plants he described bear specific epithets commemorating the towns of the region.
4 Miller, Taylor & Rempala
On 10 January 1926, Johnston crossed the border through the Paso de Valeriano, into the drainage
of the Rio de la Tagua, in the high cordilleras of Argentina. He collected in this high-mountain region
from 3000 to 4425 m for five days before returning to Chile late in the afternoon of 15 January with 121
collections from this poorly known area, including many new distributional records, seven new
species, and a new variety (Johnston, 1929b).
Table 1. Types of marine algae collected by Ivan Johnston on the California Academy of
Sciences exploration of the Gulf of California in 1921. S. & G. = Setch. & N. L. Gardner.
Coll. Family Species
No.
1 Rhodophyllidaceae Hypnea johnstonii S. & G.
2 Sargassaceae Sargassum guardiense S. & G.
8 Codiaceae Codia simulans S. & G.
8a Oscillatoriaceae Hydrocoleum codicola S. & G.
9e Rivulariaceae Calothrix nodulosa S. & G.
11 Sargassaceae Sargassum insulare S. & G.
lib Corynophyloeaceae Gonodia johnstonii S. & G.
13a Chamaesiphonaceae Xenococcus deformans S. & G.
16 Codiaceae Codium conjunctum S. & G.
18b Rhodomelaceae Laurencia obtusiuscula var. corymbifera
S. &G.
21 Rhodophyllidaceae Corallopsis excavata S. & G.
(syntype with Johnston 59)
23 Gelidiaceae Gelidium decompositum S. & G.
24 Encoeliaceae Colpomenia sinuosa f. expansissima
S. &G.
26 Chaetophoraceae Entocladia condensata S. & G.
27 Gelidiaceae Gelidium johnstonii S. & G.
27a Ceramiaceae Ceramium procumbens S. & G.
32 Dictyotaceae Dictyota hesperia S. & G.
34c Chamaesiphonaceae Dermocarpa reinschii S. & G.
36 Rhodophyllidaceae Gracilaria vivipara S. & G.
41 Rhodomelaceae Polysiphonia sinicola S. & G.
42 Codiaceae Codium reductum S. & G.
44 Rhodophyllidaceae Gracilaria pinnata S. & G.
47 Codiaceae Codium cuneatum S. & G.
47e Ectocarpaceae Ectocarpus gonodioides S. & G.
49b Chaetophoraceae Entocladia mexicana S. & G.
53b Ceramiaceae Callithamnion endovagum S. & G.
53c Rhodomelaceae Laurencia estebaniana S. & G.
53e Grateloupiaceae Prionitis abbreviata S. & G.
56 Nemastomaceae Schizymenia johnstonii S. & G.
58b Myrionemataceae Compsonema immixtum S. & G.
59 Rhodophyllidaceae Corallopsis excavata S. & G.
(syntype with Johnston 21)
60 Grateloupiaceae Grateloupia squarrulosa S. & G.
62 Rhodophyllidaceae Gracilaria johnstonii S. & G.