Biography

American botanist and agriculturist. Cook was an authority on palms and spent nearly 30 years as a tropical agriculture specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Orator Fuller Cook was born in Clyde, New York, and graduated from Syracuse University in 1890. He worked as an instructor at the university the following year and married Alice Carter in 1892.

Cook and his wife made many plant collections together in Africa, where Cook was employed from 1891-1898 as an agent for the State Colonization Society in Liberia. They also collected in the Canary Islands during this time. Cook joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1898, where he remained until his retirement in 1927, also serving as an assistant curator at the U.S. National Herbarium. At the U.S.D.A. he rose from plant scientist to principal botanist, for several years being in charge of seed and plant introduction and variously dealing with cotton, rubber and other economic plants. To this end he made several trips to Mexico and Central America, Puerto Rico and Cuba. He also visited China and Japan, and in the last few years of his tenure he made repeated trips to Haiti and Panama.

In addition to his core work, Cook was interested in myriad other subjects including mycology, sociology and millipedes, though palms were his favourite object of study. He published his first papers on the family in 1901, though time and rules of nomenclature have since been unkind to many of the taxa he described. He was a so-called 'splitter', finding new species which often met with disagreement. One of these he first published, to his colleagues' horror, in a newspaper. The species, Washingtonia arizonica, was not accepted as any different from Washingtonia filifera (Lindl.) H.Wendl.; neither was his Cocos Island palm discovery, dubbed Rooseveltia frankliniana after the U.S. president. The latter (which remained in the genus Euterpe) was so-called because Roosevelt was present on a trip to the island when material was collected for Cook to study.

Cook retired in 1937, but continued to publish work on palms and other subjects of his own choosing. In all he published nearly 400 articles and books, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by Syracuse University in 1930. Cook disliked city life, having an unbounded love for simple country living; he was said to shun large crowds and social gatherings. One of his idiosyncrasies was to whittle wooden objects at his desk, which was usually piled high with correspondence and notes. His personal herbarium became part of the U.S. National Herbarium.

Sources:
H.F. Loomis, 1950, Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, 40: 173-175
V. Rudd, D.S. Correll and R.W. Read, 1982, "O.F. Cook and His World: Three Botanists Recall an Individualist", Principes, 27(2): 76-84.