British botanist specialising in pteridology. Aurthur Alston was born in the village of West Ashby, Lincolnshire. His father, a vicar, was an amateur naturalist and inspired his son to take an interest in insects and plants. He went on to study botany at Oxford, graduating in 1924, after which he spent several months working in the herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He then spent a number of years as a systematic botanist for the colonial Department of Agriculture in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) before he was recruited to the botany department of the British Museum (Natural History) in 1930, as Assistant Keeper of the Herbarium. Here he took charge of the Pteridophyta and became a particular authority on the moss-like genus Selaginella. Despite his specialisation, he maintained an interest in all kinds of botany, authoring works on subjects as diverse as grains found in excavations of Iron Age villages and on the emetic plant famously used in ceremonies by American Indians, Ilex vomitoria (co-authored with Richard Schultes). Alston edited the British Fern Gazette from 1937-1949 and completed a wealth of publications in his lifetime, his final work being The Ferns and Fern Allies of West Tropical Africa (1959).
Alston was an extremely keen collector, travelling abroad every year. He especially visited the Balkans and Spain, but also reached far-flung destinations in Indonesia and South America, not to mention his lengthy sojourn in Sri Lanka, which gave him his introduction to tropical flora. In 1938 he made his way to Venezuela and Colombia, where he collected Andean plants. In 1953 he was invited by the Indonesian government to visit Java, Sumatra and other Malaysian islands. He was also well acquainted with herbaria all over Europe, where he examined and photographed type specimens. His colleague and obituarist Peter Bell wrote of him: "As a person Alston had many of the marks of genius. To the young he often appeared distant, absorbed and unapproachable. He was undoubtedly an individualist, and one who would never have been happy to have himself regarded as a member of a team. He suffered from the disadvantage of being thought by many a recluse, although in the right environment no one could be more convivial." Bell goes on to note his scholarly, "aristocratic" attitude to science, leaving one with no doubt that Alston was an intellectual force to be reckoned with. His untimely death, aged 55, occurred while he was in Barcelona, prematurely depriving the field of botany of an esteemed taxonomist. The algae genus Alstoniamitus Skrortzov. is named in his honour.
Sources:
F. Ballard, 1958, "A.H.G. Alston", Journal of the Kew Guild, 7(63): 587
P.R. Bell, 1959, "A.H.G. Alston, 1902-1958", Taxon, 8(3): 83-86
R. Desmond, 1994, Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists and Horticulturists: 13.
