American botanist. Theodore Christian Frye was born on a farm near Washington, Illinois, the eldest of five boys in a family of ten children. Although he could only go to school when farm work was least demanding, Frye was determined to get an education. He began teaching even before he had finished his own high school course, and was in such demand that it took him until the age of 22 to complete all his entrance requirements for the University of Illinois.

After graduating with a BSc, he returned to teaching. His goal, however, was research and teaching in botany, and so, after several years as a high school administrator, he applied for and won a teaching fellowship in botany at the University of Chicago. His doctoral dissertation, supervised by John M. Coulter, "A Morphological Study of Certain Asclepiadaceae", was published in the Botanical Gazette in 1902. The following year he was appointed professor and head of the botany department at the University of Washington, Seattle, and for five years was the only botanist at the university.

He became an enthusiastic collector of the plants of the region, which were entirely new to him, and with his colleague George B. Rigg published a flora of the Northwest in 1912. For many years he was also director of the university's marine station at Friday Harbor and editor of Publications of Puget Sound Biological Station. There he and C.E. Magnusson experimented with candying kelp bulbs and came up with a product that looked and tasted like citron (which they called "Seatron") but the two scientists never carried the project beyond the patent stage.

Frye's interest in kelp, however, opened another project. In 1913 he and Rigg were appointed to make reconnaissance surveys of Alaskan kelp beds for the United States Department of Agriculture, which was investigating the practicability of using kelp as an alternative source of potash, after Germany, the major supplier, had stopped exporting. His studies of Pacific kelp earned Frye election into the Academy of Science in Washington, DC, in 1914. He was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Botanical Society of America, an honorary member of the American Bryological Society, and a president and vice-president of the Sullivant Moss Society.

For 30 years he conducted weekly Saturday field trips for botany majors and local high school teachers, and in the 1930s introduced six-week summer field trips. Each summer from 1932 to 1937 he led a group of about 30 people on a car journey of several thousand miles, from Canada to Mexico, along the Pacific Coast and as far east as the Rockies. In his late 60s, Frye turned over the leadership of the summer field trips to a younger colleague and instead spent the summers of 1939 to 1941 collecting in Mexico with his wife, E.M. Frye, who was an authority on alpine rock plants.

In his time, Frye was regarded as one the world's leading bryologists and his bryophyte herbarium was one of the largest and best known collections in the American West. With a former student, Lois Clark, he published The Liverworts of the Northwest in 1928 and, later, the multivolume Hepaticae of North America (1937-1947). After his retirement from teaching, he, Clark, and Ruth Svilha undertook a revision of Frullania species from South America and the United States, which they published one-by-one in botanical journals, the last in 1955. Frye worked right to the end of his life and is reported to have been in the herbarium the day before he died, at the age of 92. He is commemorated by several eponyms including the algal genus Fryeella Kylin, the red algae Fauchea fryeana Setch. and Weeksia fryeana Setch.; a hepactic collected by him in Alaska in 1913, Plagiochila fryei A. Evans; and a moss collected by him in Oregon in 1922, Sciaromium fryei R.S. Williams.

Sources:
G.E. Howard, 1963, "Theodore Christian Frye (1869-1962)", The Bryologist, 66(3): 124-136.