Biography

American botanist renowned for his work on the vegetation of the 'Lost World' of the Guyana Shield region. A curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, Missouri Botanical Garden and Caracas' Instituto Botánica, Steyermark was known for his dedicated collecting and conservation work in Guatemala, Venezuela and the state of Missouri. He amassed more than 138,000 numbers, making him a truly great plant collector; a feat recognised in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Julian Alfred Steyermark was born in St Louis, Missouri, where his father was a merchant. As a Boy Scout and on school field trips with his science teacher the young Steyermark developed a love for nature and the outdoors. He often visited Missouri Botanical Garden as a young man, a place with which he would have a lifelong association. He especially liked to look at the orchid collection and paint pictures of them and other plants, even considering a career as an artist.

Steyermark decided, however, to study botany and went on to obtain his PhD from Washington University, St Louis, in 1933. His master's dissertation on Menodora (Oleaceae) and doctoral dissertation on the gumweed Grindelia (Asteraceae) were both published in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden. An impressive 360-plus scientific papers were penned by Steyermark over the course of his life, in addition to his work on floras of Missouri, Guatemala, Venezuela and more. Steyermark's collecting career began in earnest in 1926 and was an equally great, if not his greatest, achievement. Much of this work was undertaken in tropical conditions in remote areas with no roads, where his successful yields earned him huge respect. His friend, the botanist Gerrit Davidse (who he met on a collecting programme in Venezuela), thought Steyermark deserved even more recognition and had him entered into the 1986 Guinness Book of World Records as a champion plant collector.

After his doctoral studies, Steyermark worked as a research assistant to Robert E. Woodson at Missouri Botanical Garden until joining a three-month collecting trip to Panama with C.W. Hodge and Paul Allen. Though the fieldwork piqued his interest in tropical plants, he was not able to pursue this interest straight away, but had to ride out the Great Depression as a biology teacher. He also worked for the US Forest Service from 1935-1937, while continuing to collect in Missouri. He then married Cora Shoop, a local teacher, and was offered a position at the Field Museum in Chicago helping Paul C. Standley to produce a flora of Guatemala.

After a few years at the Field Museum, Steyermark was called upon in the war effort to find native sources of Cinchona for quinine production (many Asian sources being controlled by the Japanese). The task would prove a turning point in his life as he was sent first to Ecuador then Venezuela on the Cinchona inventory work, collecting thousands of herbarium specimens alongside the bark samples required.

Spending 1943 to 1945 in Venezuela, Steyermark fell in love with the country, its virgin vegetation and sandstone tepui mountains. He went on to produce the five-volume Contributions to the Flora of Venezuela, containing descriptions of nine new genera and more than 600 new species. Returning from this 'Lost World', by 1950 Steyermark was a full curator at the Field Museum and in addition to his Venezuelan work had carried out two major collecting expeditions to Guatemala, where he collected about 23,000 numbers. In the U.S., he spent nearly all his holidays and weekends collecting in Missouri, resulting in a haul of 52,000 specimens, earning him the title of Honorary Research Associate at Missouri Botanical Garden. At home in the Illinois suburb of Barrington, Steyermark and his wife grew wildflowers in their four-acre garden. They later donated part of the grounds to the Nature Conservancy organisation to be maintained as a nature reserve.

Steyermark returned to the country he loved in 1959, joining the Instituto Botánica in Caracas, where he served as herbarium curator from 1975-1981. Enamoured with this new home, he became a Venezuelan citizen and built up his collections in the country to number 60,000. Maintaining good links with North American institutions, he was a visiting curator at New York Botanical Garden during the 1960s and eventually returned, in 1984, to continue his work at Missouri. It was here that he began his ambitious project, the Flora of the Venezuelan Guayana, which was nearly half complete at the time of his death. The flora was continued by Paul E. Berry, K. Yatskievych and B.K. Holst after Steyermark's death, and is dedicated to him.

After a diagnosis of cancer of the tongue and treatment that left him unable to speak, Steyermark died at the age of 79. He was the recipient of numerous awards from the Venezuelan government and the botanical institutions at which he worked. Several genera are named after him as well as hundreds of species. Remembered by his friends and colleagues as dedicated, open and happy, he was known for his quirks such as a voracious appetite and a fastidious shaving routine, which he stuck to even on fieldtrips with scarce water supplies.

Sources:
G. Davidse, 1989, "Julian Alfred Steyermark", Taxon, 38(1): 160-163
P. Raven et al, 1989, "Steyermark Recollections", Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 76(3): 627-651.