Biography

United States botanist. Anderson spent most of his working life at Missouri Botanical Garden, where he served as director for a period and made many contributions to economic botany and ethnobotany. His research interests were wide, including the species problem, hybridisation in evolution, the genetics of self sterility and the breeding behaviour of Zea mays.

Born in Forestville, New York, Edgar Anderson grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, where his father taught dairy husbandry at the state agricultural college. Anderson developed an early love of botany, excitedly experimenting with growing plants and even trying to create hybrids before he was 10 years old. He recalled being a rather lonely child, however, taking part in few social activities, a pattern that continued as he studied horticulture at Michigan State College (now University). Graduating in 1918 he entered the Naval Reserve before being admitted to Harvard's Arnold Arboretum for his doctorate in applied biology, which he was granted in 1922. In the same year he moved to St Louis, where he took up the post of geneticist at the Henry Shaw School of Botany, Washington State University, as well as directing its School of Gardening and being appointed assistant (later associate) professor of botany at Washington University.

Shortly after moving, Anderson married Dorothy More, a botanist he met at Harvard. During this time he looked at species of Iris and Tradescantia and began to work on his theory of introgressive hydridisation. A vital part of this theory, in which interspecific hybridisation is shown to be a key phenomenon in plant evolution, was Anderson's invention of ideographs with which to measure character variation in associated plants. After a year carrying out research in England, in 1930 he moved on to the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard, where his title was arborist, returning to Missouri in 1935. In 1934 he collected in the Balkans, introducing various plants such as ivy and box from the region to the United States, which has a similar climate. At Missouri, he continued work on Iris and introgressive hybridisation, and started studying maize.

In the 1940s, Anderson made a preliminary survey of maize in Mexico and began to take an interest in ethnobotany, also writing about Indian gardens. The survey was the beginning of a period of immersive research into the classification of maize which would profoundly influence the breeding of the crop, and inspired some of the ethnobotanical themes in his autobiographical book Plants, Man and Life (1952). His most significant idea was that the large grass, teosinte, was not the chief progenitor of the popular cereal as had been believed, but quite the reverse. Anderson was not only interested in the origin of maize, but all cultivated plants, and travelled to numerous countries to pursue this line of inquiry. He set up an experimental plot in Honduras for studying ancient and modern crop plans and to Ethiopia to study the coffee plant, for instance.

In 1954 Anderson was appointed director of the Missouri Garden, a role he gave up after just over two years to return to his former territory under the title of Curator of Useful Plants. Retiring in 1967, he continued to work at Missouri, though his post-retirement career was cut short when he died, at his place of work, in 1969, following severe illness.

A Quaker, Anderson was renowned to be a very generous person and a talented teacher. He especially enjoyed teaching those with no formal training in botany, the enthusiastic amateurs, and founded the Herb Society of America with such people in the early 1930s. He had a unique writing style aimed at interesting the lay person. Of his amusing paper titles, 'How to spend a nice quiet evening with a potato' and 'Go to the index first; don't use the key unless you have to' (both 1955) demonstrate his sense of humour and skill in writing for a popular audience. He wrote many unsigned pieces for the lay-oriented Bulletin of the Missouri Botanical Garden and during his 71 years, it is estimated he wrote more than 2,000 scientific and popular articles. Many honours were conferred upon him. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, received the Darwin-Wallace Medal of the Linnean Society and a Golden Jubilee Award of Merit from the Botanical Society of America. He was also decorated by the Yugoslavian government for his work on Balkan plants.