American plant collector and botanist. Edward Lee Greene was born in Hopkinton, Rhode Island, and was educated for the ministry at Albion College, in Wisconsin, where he graduated in 1866. He served as an Episcopal clergyman for fourteen years but in 1885 converted to Catholicism and thereafter taught botany, first at the University of California and later at the Catholic University in Washington, DC. At the time of his death he was an associate in botany at the Smithsonian Institution and had recently become head of the botanical department of Notre Dame University. A vigorous advocate of nomenclature reform, he was president of the International Congress of Botanists at the Chicago Exposition in 1893. In his early life he travelled all over the western United States, and into Mexico, in search of rare plants. For many years, he was simply a plant collector sending his specimens to others to name and describe, but after 1888 he began to write extensively and by the end of his life had described more than 3000 taxa. His major works were Pittonia, Leaflets, The West American Oaks, and Landmarks of Botanical History. He is commemorated in the names of many species of plants and in the genus Greenella A. Gray.

Sources:
1915, "Dr Edward Greene Lee, Botanist", The New York Times, November 11, 1915
J.N. Rose, 1916, "Edward greene Lee", Botanical Gazette, 61(1): 70-72.