American botanist. Wurdack's specialism was in the tropical Melastomataceae family, of which over 100 new taxa have been named in his honour. He described an astonishing 905 new taxa himself, including 19 genera.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, John Julius Wurdack graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1942, whereafter he was posted to Brazil with the US Army. For his part in the Second World War he served as a sanitary engineer at Parnamirim Air Field in Natal, Rio Grande del Norte, a stop-off point for aircraft on their way to Africa, Europe and Asia. In his spare time he took the opportunity to collect plants and continued to do so when he was posted to Japan after the war, also visiting Guam and China.

After completing a second bachelor's degree, this time in sanitary engineering (at the University of Illinois), Wurdack turned his full attention to botany, and began a decade-long association with the New York Botanical Garden; from 1949 as a technical assistant while he studied for his PhD (granted by Columbia University in 1952), and then as an assistant and associate curator (until 1960). At NYBG he was encouraged by senior curator Bassett Maguire to take over the work of the soon-to-retire H.A. Gleason on Melastomataceae, and accompanied Maguire on a series of scientific expeditions to the remote mountains of the 'Lost World' of Amazonian Venezuela. In this endeavour he travelled thousands of miles by river and on foot and became the first scientist to explore or to collect botanical specimens on a number of tepuis in the Venezuelan Guayana. Most notably, in 1953 he was with Maguire and others when Cerro de la Neblina was discovered, named, and climbed. Cerro de la Neblina, a large massif on the Venezuelan-Brazilian border, was one of the last major mountain ranges in the world to be discovered.

In 1960 Wurdack accepted an appointment as an associate curator at the Smithsonian Insitution and began a new phase in his career, working principally with the scientific collections in the US National Herbarium and the tens of thousands of specimens sent to him as gifts for determination. He travelled a little in the following years, to Europe to study historical material, and to Peru (1962), Venezuela and Jamaica. Formally retiring in 1991, Wurdack continued in his research at the museum, until he was diagnosed with cancer in 1997.

In 1997, a Festschrift (BioLlania, Edición Especial No. 6) was published to celebrate Wurdack's career and 75th birthday, in which many of his 130-plus scientific papers were reproduced. In addition to his papers, he prepared long treatments of the Melastomataceae for the floras of Venezuela (1973), Ecuador (1980) and the Guianas (1993).

Wurdack was a keen gardener, growing exotic and native species at his home in Beltsville, Maryland. He also was a charter member of the Potomac Valley Chapter of the American Rock Garden Society. His wife, Marie L. Solt, died in 1978. One of his two sons, Kenneth Wurdack, is also a botanist and associate curator at the Smithsonian.


Sources:
L.J. Dorr, 1998, "In Memoriam: John J. Wurdack, 1921-1998", Plant Science Bulletin, 44(2): 41
L.J. Dorr, 1998, "John J. Wurdack (1921-1998)", Taxon, 47(4): 971-973.