North American botanist and curator of the herbarium of the Missouri Botanical Garden from 1913. Greenman was an authority on the large genus Senecio and made substantial collections in Central America, however his most admired work was in dutifully organising the once chaotic herbarium at Missouri.
Jesse More Greenman was born at North East in Erie County, Pennsylvania, and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1893. He spent the following year as a botany instructor at the university before transferring to Harvard to work in the Gray Herbarium. He served as a herbarium assistant until 1899, when he gained his master's degree. During this time he was much influenced by the Gray curator Benjamin Robinson, whose fascination for Mexico and tropical South America he shared. Of similar character, the pair were once described as "gentlemen of the Old School, courtly and immaculate, soft-spoken and deliberate in word and action; innately conservative and studied" (Woodson, 1951). In his obituary of Greenman, his assistant and successor R.E. Woodson also noted another parallelism in their lives: "while Robinson elected the vast genus Eupatorium as a life work, Greenman chose the even more appalling genus Senecio".
Greenman spent 1899-1901 studying under Adolf Engler in Berlin, where he was awarded his PhD. On his return to the U.S. in 1902 he married Anne Turner and taught at Harvard until 1905, when he was appointed assistant curator to Charles Millspaugh at the Field Museum in Chicago. Millspaugh was also interested in South American flora and allowed Greenman to make several collecting trips to Mexico and Central America. Three years later he also took up an assistant professorship at the University of Chicago, though in 1913 he moved on again, this time to the Missouri Botanical Garden and Washington University in St. Louis, once more taking with him his Senecios.
By now a full curator, he was promoted to a full professorship at Washington in 1917. A daunting task fell to him in the Missouri herbarium, where no detailed inventory or systematic accession records had ever been made. The organisation of its 600,000-plus specimens took over Greenman's life, though he still found time to be an enthusiastic teacher and attend numerous scientific and academic conventions (he was an active member of 13 learned societies). During his tenure, the herbarium grew in tropical American specimens thanks to students and staff based at a research station in Panama.
In 1922 Greenman himself made a well-earned escape from his work in Missouri to collect plants in Central America for three months, accompanied by his youngest son, Milton Greenman. The middle of this decade saw him begin to suffer some severe illnesses, however, and adding to his woes in 1936 his wife died. He suffered a stroke in 1945, after which he became professor emeritus and curator emeritus, and finally had time to return to his Senecio work, but alas he had only a few years left to devote to the vast genus. In 1968 the Jesse M. Greenman Award for outstanding PhD dissertations was inaugurated at Missouri Botanical Garden. The genera Greenmania P. Hieronymus and Greenmaniella W.M. Sharp were both named after him. Senecio multivenius Benth., S. cooperi Greenm. and S. megaphyllus Greenm. were reclassified in the new genus Jessea H. Robinson and J. Cuatrecases in Greenman's honour.
Sources:
Anon., A Guide to the Archives and Manuscripts of the Missouri Botanical Garden: 20
P.C. Standley, 1952, Ceiba, 3: 66-68
R.E. Woodson, Jr., 1951, "Jesse More Greenman (1867-1951)", Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 38(2): 95-100
Field Museum, Botany Department:
http://www.fieldmuseum.org/research_collections/botany/history.htm.
