Biography

American botanist and conservationist. Edward (Ted) Frederick Anderson, author of Plants and People of the Golden Triangle (1993), Threatened Cacti of Mexico (1994), and The Cactus Family (2001), was Senior Research Botanist at the Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix, Arizona, and professor emeritus at Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington. At the latter he taught biology for more than two decades. Anderson was born and raised in southern California and studied botany at Pomona College in Claremont. After one year of graduate study he left college to serve in the U.S. Army in Germany but, near the end of his tour of duty, was coaxed back by his mentor, the cactus expert Dr Lyman Benson, to undertake a study on peyote for Dr Gordon Alles, a research pharmacologist at Cal-Tech. This study became the basis of Anderson's PhD thesis (1961) and his later book Peyote: the divine cactus (1996). Before joining Whitman College, he worked as a research biologist at Claremont College and lectured at overseas universities in Ecuador, Malaysia, and Thailand. The last five years of his life were devoted to completing his book on cacti, the only professional monograph on the subject since N.L. Britton and J.N. Rose published their collaborative work between 1919 and 1923.

Anderson was a past president of the International Organization for Succulent Plant Study (IOS), which he joined in 1974, and a member, from its inception in 1984, of the Cactus and Succulent Specialist Group (CSSG) of the World Conservation Union-Species Survival Commission, for which he served as Chair from 1988 virtually until his death. He was also a fellow of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America and of the Linnean Society of London. In 1998 he was awarded the Cactus d'Or, sponsored by the Principality of Monaco, for his outstanding research. For almost 50 years he travelled the arid regions of North and South America in search of cacti. His Mexican collections, beginning in 1953, were made primarily in the northern states (Baja California, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Hidalgo, Nuevo León, Puebla, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Sonora, Tamaulipas and Zacatecas). Plants named after him include Mammillaria perezdelarosae Bravo & Scheinvar subsp. andersoniana W.A. Fitz Maur. & B. Fitz Maur., Turbinicarpus schmiedickeanus subsp. andersonii Mosco and Turbinicactus macrochele subsp. andersonii (Mosco) Doweld.

Sources:
I.W. Knobloch, 1979, The Plant Collectors of Northern Mexico
G.F. Smith and L.A. Slauson, 2001, "Edward F. (Ted) Anderson: one of the greatest students of Cactaceae of the 20th century", Taxon, 50(3): 939-942.