French Canadian botanist who served as Assistant Professor of Dendrology at the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University. John George Jack was born at Chateauguay, a suburb of Montreal. Jack's early interest in plants was probably due to the influence of his mother, a former schoolteacher and keen horticulturist who wrote articles on the subject and published a book entitled The Canadian Garden.
Jack first came to the Arnold Arboretum in 1886 to study under Professor C.S. Sargent. Within five years he was appointed as a lecturer at the arboretum, and went on to serve as Instructor in Forestry from 1903-1908 and also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as Lecturer in Forestry (1899-1908). He was Assistant Professor of Dendrology at the arboretum from 1908, remaining there until his retirement in 1935, at which point he was made Emeritus. He was also on the staff of the Bussey Institution and the Harvard Forest. In 1907 he married Cerise Carmen, with whom he adopted two children.
Alongside his day-to-day identification and teaching work at the Arnold Arboretum, Jack took part in various collecting trips. With the arboretum strapped for cash and Jack on a meagre salary of $500 per annum, he sought the finances for expeditions from outside sources. Successful in this, he visited botanic gardens in Europe in 1891 (France, Germany, Italy, Denmark and England) and in 1904 made extensive collections in the western U.S. and Canada, accompanied by Alfred Rehder. He studied native and cultivated ornamental plants in Japan, Korea and China in 1905, and most years between 1926 and 1936 he spent time at the Atkins Botanical Garden in Cuba, working with living collections there and collecting native plants around Soledad.
Jack published several hundred papers dealing with the plants grown at the arboretum and his fieldwork. His writings appeared in Garden and Forest and the arboretum's Bulletin of Popular Information. A number of plant taxa were named in honour of Jack, such as Sinojackia Hu and Crataegus jackii Sarg. He died at his home, Folly Farm, in East Walpole.
Sources:
K. Sax, 1949, "John George Jack, 1861-1949", Journal of the Arnold Arboretum, 30: 345-347.
