American botanist. Ivan Johnston, a native of Los Angeles, California, studied botany at Pomona College and earned his MA at Berkeley and his PhD at Harvard. After his doctoral studies, he conducted field work in Chile on a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship. His professional career at Harvard began as an assistant in the Gray Herbarium and was followed by promotions to research associate of the Arnold Arboretum in 1931 and associate professor of botany in 1938. From 1948 to 1953 he was also associate director of the Arnold Arboretum. During the Second World War he served as a research consultant for the Chemical Warfare Service in Panama, and later was cited by the American government for his studies on the effects of gases on defoliation in jungles. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Plant Taxonomists, the Botanical Society of America, the American Society of Naturalists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New England Botanical Club, and Sigma Xi.
Johnston made his first botanical collections as a teenager in California, inspired by his correspondence and friendship with the pioneer botanist Samuel Parish. He was fascinated with wetland plants, explored the highest parts of the San Gabriel Mountains for native wildflowers, trees, and shrubs, and at the age of 21 completed a floristic monograph of the San Antonio Mountains. At Berkeley, his supervisor, Dr Willis Jepson, recommended the family Boraginaceae as a subject of research, and Johnston eventually became an authority on the family worldwide. He travelled widely in connection with his floras of the Andes, the southwest United States, and the Intermontane Plateau of northern Mexico. He was also conversant with geology and other related subjects and was a passionate student of Lepidoptera, which he had hoped to pursue more seriously in his retirement.
Sources:
D.S. Correll, 1961, "Ivan Murray Johnston (1898-1960)", Taxon, 10(1): 1-8
R.J. van de Hoek, 2005, "Restoration and Recovery for Elna Bakker and Ivan Johnston":
http://naturespeace.org/ballona1917ivanjohnston.htm
J. Lanjouw, 1960, "Ivan Murray Johnston (1898-1960)", Taxon, 9(7): 220.
