American botanist. George Lindsay grew up mostly in southern California, near Pomona. His parents were orchardists who bought a lemon ranch in Lakeside, San Diego County, when Lindsay was a teenager, and which they eventually passed to him. He was interested from an early age in desert plants, and as soon as he got his driver's license, at the age of 14, he began to explore and collect further afield, culminating in his first trip to Baja California in 1932 with George McLain. He returned in 1934 with his friends Theodore Hutchinson and George Aschenbrener, and the following year, while travelling on his own, partly by muleback, he made his first discovery, a taxon of the genus Cochemiea Walton (Cactaceae), which he named C. maritima G.E. Linds. (= C. pondii Walton subsp. maritima (G.E. Linds.) U. Guzmán. On his next collecting trip, in 1936, he and college classmates Arthur Bridge and Robert Davis discovered Mammillaria angelensis R.T. Craig. In the summer of 1938 he drove the full length of the peninsula with Robert Hoard, an instructor from Pomona College who collected reptiles. That autumn he also collected in central Mexico as far as Oaxaca, and from then onward made frequent visits to the Sonora Desert, using Rancho Guirocoba as his base.

Through his travels and writings he caught the attention of the Board of Trustees of the newly formed Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona, who were looking for their first director. Even though he was just 22 years old, and had completed only three years of college, he justified their choice by seeing the garden off to a successful start, which included the construction of the main administrative building, the layout of the gardens, and the planting of thousands of native cacti, many of which he collected himself on a trip to Baja California Norte in 1939.

After serving as a combat cinematographer with the Army Air Force in the Second World War, he returned to lemon ranching, which he interspersed with trips to Mexico, often in the company of Reid Moran. In 1947, while visiting San Pedro Nolasco Island with Herbert Bool, he discovered Echinocereus websterianus G.E. Linds. and Mammillaria multidigitata Radley.

In 1949 he gave up farming and went to Stanford University to finish his undergraduate degree in botany and begin doctoral studies under Ira Wiggins. His PhD thesis, on the taxonomy and ecology of the genus Ferocactus, required extensive and prolonged field work throughout Mexico and, when published in 1955, included descriptions of 12 new species. In 1952 he persuaded his banker friend J.W. Sefton to sponsor an expedition on his ship Orca in the Gulf of California, with Lindsay as scientific director and a crew that included Moran, W.C. Steere, and seven Stanford graduate students. The Sefton-Stanford Gulf of California Expedition travelled over 5,000 miles in 61 days, stopping on 26 islands to make collections.

For the next two summers, 1953 and 1954, Lindsay served as an administrative assistant and botanical collector for the Arctic Research Laboratory in Point Barrow, Alaska, which was under the directorship of Ira Wiggins. Shortly after completing his work at Stanford, he was appointed director of the San Diego Natural History Museum. During his five-year tenure, he placed great emphasis on building up the collections and research staff. He hired Moran as curator of botany and encouraged field work in Baja California, which included the establishment of the Vermillion Sea Field Station at Bahia de los Angeles. He also found time for three overland collecting trips with Moran to southern Mexico, and organised two more major trips to the islands of the Gulf of California, one for the Natural History Museum in 1962, the other in 1966 for the Museum and the California Academy of Sciences, where he became director from 1963 and remained until his retirement in 1982.

His last serious collecting trip was in 1964 when he participated on an international expedition to the Galapagos Islands sponsored by the Academy, the University of California, and the National Science Foundation. He described 18 taxa, all cacti, and was a frequent contributor to the Cactus and Succulent Journal, Desert Plant Life, and Pacific Discovery. Seven botanical species, most of them succulents, a scorpion from Sierra Laguna, Baja California and a snake from Isla Carmen, Gulf of California, are all named in his honour.

Sources:
A. Barnett, 2003, "The Legacy of George Lindsay", California Wild, Spring 2003: 42-45
L.W. Mitich, "George E. Lindsay - Explorer and Plantsman, Part 1", Cactus and Succulent Journal, 60: 278-282
L.W. Mitich, "George E. Lindsay - Explorer and Plantsman, Part 2", Cactus and Succulent Journal, 61: 17-21
R. Moran, 2003, "George E. Lindsay (1916-2002)", Cactus and Succulent Journal (US), 75(3).