Botanist Evan Guest is best known for his work on the flora of Iraq, though he also collected plants in Malaysia, where he was an agricultural advisor.
Born in London, Guest attended Eton College before studying botany at Imperial College, London. He went on to spend a year at agricultural college in Wye, Kent, and a further year at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad.
Having learnt Arabic from his father, a scholar in the language, Guest was drawn to a career in the Arab-speaking world and spent two years in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, before taking up his first agricultural post in Iraq. He remained in the country until the end of the British Mandate in 1933.
In the course of his duties, Guest travelled throughout Iraq, sending specimens he collected to Kew. Retaining duplicates, he was able to build up a herbarium at the Department of Agriculture and Forestry in Rustam and later, Abughraib, near Baghdad. He accompanied the botanists Alexander Eig and Zohary on their botanical explorations in Iraq in 1933.
Guest's next posting was as a London-based agricultural advisor to ICI (Malaya). He then moved to Malaya (Malaysia) as a botanist with the Rubber Institute in Kuala Lumpur, extending his knowledge of tropical economic botany. His knowledge of Arabic was again useful.
Returning to England in 1940, his age prevented him from being accepted for active service in the Second World War. Instead, he was employed by the BBC Foreign Service in London and Cairo.
In Iraq once more from 1953, Guest resumed botanical work. He accompanied Karl Heinz Rechinger, initiator of Flora Iranica, on an expedition in 1956-1957. Meanwhile, due to the Suez invasion of 1955, his position became precarious. Informed by a local man that his life was in danger, Guest and his wife abandoned their property and fled to England in 1958.
Living in Hertfordshire, Guest continued to work on the Flora of Iraq at Kew and the first two volumes were published in 1966. After his wife's death in 1976 he moved within walking distance of the herbarium, and contributed to five further volumes of the Flora in the next decade. Funding for the flora, from the Iraqi government, diminished in the 1980s, however, and Guest ceased his work in 1987. He did not live to see its completion, for he died five years later. Aged 90, he had been suffering from bronchial pneumonia.
Sources:
M.M. Harley & J. Gillett, "Evan Rhuvon Guest (1902-1992)", Taxon, 41(3): 616-617.
