PLANT COLLECTORS IN KASHMIR

While studying Botany, students hardly spare a thought about the processes and the people who gave their lives to identify and name the plants that Kashmir grows. Exceptional botanist, Ralph R Stewart who push-biked into Kashmir more than a century earlier details the contributions that Western experts made to Kashmir taxonomy

- Ralph R Stewart

I must be Rogers McVaugh’s oldest pupil. I did not know him until I was 70 and about to retire from Gordon College, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, where I had worked from 1911 until 1960, except for occasional furloughs in this country. When Rogers took charge of the angiosperm herbarium in 1960, following the death of ‘Uncle’ Harley Bartlett, his distinguished predecessor, he found that he had a legacy of some 150,000 specimens in bales and bundles in various storerooms. Some of these specimens had been in storage for fifty years. As about 30,000 of these specimens were from India, McVaugh looked around to find someone with a knowledge of Indian plants. A friend told him that I was retiring from Gordon College and he wrote to inquire if I were available. As I did not want to move into an Old Folks Home we gladly moved to Ann Arbor.

Rogers may not have realized that I was his pupil but living and working in his herbarium, and watching the way he did things was an inspiration to me. I had been a lecturer and administrator in a missionary college and a plant collector in my free time and was glad to learn how things were done in a good herbarium.

Eighteen years have passed and I am still working in a far corner of his herbarium and he is about to follow me into official retirement. After coming to Ann Arbor I worked for two years getting the Indian specimens into the herbarium and when the National Science Foundation grant supporting me ran out I was advised to try for one of my own to work on the flora of Pakistan, and Kashmir. India had been divided in 1947 and the place where I lived had become part of Pakistan.