American botanist. G. Neville Jones was born in Boston, England, but emigrated with his family to Canada while he was still a child. His interest in plants was perhaps influenced by his father's work for a seed company in Brandon, Manitoba. After he graduated from high school, his family moved to Seattle, Washington, and two years later, despite some initial reluctance, he joined them. He received his BS degree from Washington State University, Pullman, in 1930 and his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1932 and 1937 respectively. His doctoral thesis was a floristic study of Mount Rainier, an active stratovolcano southeast of Seattle.
From 1937 to 1939 he was instructor and tutor in biology at Harvard University and technical assistant at the Arnold Arboretum, after which he moved to the University of Illinois as taxonomist and curator of the herbarium. Soon after his appointment, he began work on a state flora, which was published in 1945. As a taxonomist, he had broad interests. In addition to his floristic work, he published studies of angiosperms from more than a dozen families, of ferns, of the Selaginellaceae and Lycopodiaceae, and the moss family Grimmiaceae.
Jones was an active collector of material for all his botanical work. During his tenure as curator, he built up the herbarium from 200,000 to 500,000 specimens, of which 46,000 were his own numbers. In 1958 he collected about a thousand specimens, many from the genus Tilia, in fifteen Mexican states. He also collected in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, and Puerto Rico. His death was the result of injuries from an automobile accident that occurred en route to Allerton Park, where he had collected plants for two decades and where his life's work has been memorialized by a plaque on an American linden.
He was the author of 82 publications, notably the Annotated Bibliography of Mexican Ferns (1966), for which he received the Eunice Rockwell Obberly Award from the American Library Association in 1967. From 1944 to 1961, he was editor of the American Midland Naturalist. His scientific affiliations included the New England Botanical Club, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Botanical Society of America, American Biological and Lichenological Society, American Society for Plant Taxonomy, Illinois State Academy of Science, Indiana Academy of Science, American Fern Society, California Botanical Society, International Association for Plant Taxonomy, Sigma Xi, and Sociedad Botanical de Mexico.
Sources:
1970, "Obituary: George Neville Jones", Plant Science Bulletin, 16(3):
http://www.botany.org/plantsciencebulletin/psb-1970-16-3.php
W.W. Payne and R.A. Evers, 1971, "George Neville Jones 1903-1970", Taxon, 20(4): 597-602.
