American botanist at the New York Botanical Garden from 1899 to 1944. Wilson was assistant to Nathaniel Lord Britton, with whom he worked on a flora of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Wilson developed an interest in plants as a teenager, making the acquaintance of the botanist H.H. Rusby.
Shortly before he was 20 years old he began work at NYBG as a museum aide, where director N.L. Britton observed the young man's industrious nature and decided to send him on some of the Garden's earliest expeditions. One of these was the 'Total Eclipse Expedition' to the East Indies where Wilson was commissioned to establish official ties with botanic gardens in Asia. He successfully procured various specimens for the burgeoning herbarium in New York and in 1902 joined Nathaniel and Elizabeth Britton on their first explorations of Puerto Rico, returning after six weeks with more than 3,000 specimens.
Over the following years, Wilson became an expert on the flora of the West Indies and also made trips to Honduras, subtropical Florida and Cuba, leaving NYBG to take up a post in the latter country in 1904. He worked at the Estac⟭on Agronomica de Cuba for one year as assistant botanist before returning to New York, where he was employed as an administrative assistant and docent, later taking on his first curatorial role in 1911. His chief work, however, was as a personal assistant to N.L. Britton. He continued to travel to the tropics, collecting plants in the Bahamas (1907 and 1909) and Cuba (1910, 1911 and 1916), and carried out research on the Altingiaceae and Rutaceae in these early years.
In collaboration with Britton, his major oeuvre was the Flora of Porto Rico and the Virgin Islands, published between 1923 and 1931, comprising more than 2,000 species. After the last volume of this flora was published he devoted himself to a flora of Cuba that sadly remained unpublished. He did publish The Vegetation of Viques Island in 1917 based on his explorations of Puerto Rico and continued to collaborate with Puerto Rican scientists and government after Britton's retirement in 1929. He retired himself ten years later, stricken by a degenerative illness which led to his death in 1944. The decline of the assistant curator, once the star of the Garden's baseball team, was poignant for associates to watch and led Henry Gleason in his obituary to describe the existence of two quite different Percy Wilsons, before and after the unidentified illness took hold.
Sources:
H.A. Gleason, 1944, ✢Percy Wilson - An Appreciation✢, Journal of the New York Botanical Garden, 45: 49-53
H.A. Liogier, 1996, ✢Botany and Botanists in Puerto Rico✢, The Scientific Survey of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands: 42 (in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 776).
