United States botanist. Born in Yamhill County, Oregon, the third of eight children, John Maurice Tucker was a still a baby when his family settled in Santa Barbara, California. As a teenager he worked after school at the botanical gardens and received encouragement there from the director to study botany, which he did at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his BS degree in 1940. During the Second World War, he worked as a welder in the Oaklands shipyards. In 1947, while also completing his doctorate at UC Berkeley, he began working at the University of California, Davis, as director of the botany department herbarium, which was named after him on his retirement in 1986. During his tenure he introduced an exchange programme with other institutions which has increased the herbarium's collection from 9,500 to 250,000 specimens. A world-renowned expert on oak taxonomy, he was director of the UC Davis Arboretum from 1972 to 1984. The impressive Shields Oak Grove, named after the campus founder, Peter J Fields, was planted by Tucker in 1962 from acorns collected around the world. In 2000, he donated half a million dollars to UC Davis to maintain the grove and build a new home for the herbarium to which he had dedicated his life.

Sources:
R.D. Dávila, "Obituary: UC Davis names herbarium for John M. Tucker", Sacramento Bee, 11 July 2008.