Biography

A distinguished professor at the University of Michigan, Warren H. Wagner (known familiarly as Herb) was an expert pteridologist. It was his research on ferns that led to his two greatest legacies for botany; the phylogenetic 'Wagner Tree' and the breakaway concept of plant species being very different from zoological species. His interests also extended to oaks and difficult groups of flowering plants, as well as butterflies and minerals.

Wagner was born and raised in Washington DC, where his father was a lawyer. Early visits to the Smithsonian Institution whetted his appetite for natural history and he became acquainted with the museum's eminent pteridologists, W.R. Maxon and C.V. Morton. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942, Wagner enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving in the Atlantic and Pacific during the Second World War. He would spend his leave collecting ferns and butterflies on Pacific islands (alongside fellow navigator David Grether), taking his specimens to fern expert E.B. Copeland at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to Berkeley after the war to work on a PhD, meeting his wife, fellow student Florence Signaigo, in the university herbarium (they married in 1948).

After gaining his doctorate Wagner spent a year at Harvard's Gray Herbarium, and came to the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor of Botany in 1951. He continued to teach after his retirement 40 years later, always amusing his students and teaching assistants with his expression and exaggerations, watching to see who believed Rafflesia was pollinated by elephants, Wolffia by mosquitoes and Podophyllum by turtles. He served a term as director of the Matthaei Botanical Garden from 1966 to 1971 and chaired the university's botany department from 1974 to 1977, though administration was never his strong suit, while he found teaching a joy.

In the 1950s and 60s, working in collaboration with his wife, Wagner published a series of elegant studies showing that ferns hybridise freely. The idea that plants are different from animals in the ease with which they form hybrids is now widely accepted, but at the time Wagner's proposal went against convention. With missionary zeal he exhorted botanists to tighten up their approach to the inference of phylogeny, sowing the seeds of modern cladistics with his method for plotting species relationships and character changes in an explicit, testable way. He developed this 'Ground-Plan Divergence Index' while attempting to infer the ancestors of the Hawaiian fern genus Diellia. This seminal contribution to systematic biology was recognised by several awards and the moniker 'Wagner Tree' for representing phylogenetic relationships in this way.

Wagner's many honours included election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985 and the Asa Gray Award from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists in 1990. He served as chair and president of nine professional societies, including the Botanical Society of America (1977), and served as an editor on the Flora of North America (co-editing the Pteridophytes in volume two). His enthusiasm was renowned and after giving talks he would surprise his audience by sitting down at the piano and proceeding to play lively honky-tonk. An active field worker throughout his life, his last collections were made in the summer before his death in south-western Canada, where he and Florence found a new species of Botrychium (moonwort). The couple had two children, Margaret and Warren.

Sources:
W.R. Anderson, 2000, "Warren H. Wagner, Jr., 1911-2000", Plant Science Bulletin, 46(1): 17-18
D.R. Farrar, 2000, "Warren H. Wagner, Jr. (1920-2000), Taxon, 49(3): 585-592
D.R. Farrar, 2002, American Fern Journal, 92(2): 39-49.

Biography

A distinguished professor at the University of Michigan, Warren H. Wagner (known familiarly as Herb) was an expert pteridologist. It was his research on ferns that led to his two greatest legacies for botany; the phylogenetic 'Wagner Tree' and the breakaway concept of plant species being very different from zoological species. His interests also extended to oaks and difficult groups of flowering plants, as well as butterflies and minerals.

Wagner was born and raised in Washington DC, where his father was a lawyer. Early visits to the Smithsonian Institution whetted his appetite for natural history and he became acquainted with the museum's eminent pteridologists, W.R. Maxon and C.V. Morton. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942, Wagner enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving in the Atlantic and Pacific during the Second World War. He would spend his leave collecting ferns and butterflies on Pacific islands (alongside fellow navigator David Grether), taking his specimens to fern expert E.B. Copeland at the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to Berkeley after the war to work on a PhD, meeting his wife, fellow student Florence Signaigo, in the university herbarium (they married in 1948).

After gaining his doctorate Wagner spent a year at Harvard's Gray Herbarium, and came to the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor of Botany in 1951. He continued to teach after his retirement 40 years later, always amusing his students and teaching assistants with his expression and exaggerations, watching to see who believed Rafflesia was pollinated by elephants, Wolffia by mosquitoes and Podophyllum by turtles. He served a term as director of the Matthaei Botanical Garden from 1966 to 1971 and chaired the university's botany department from 1974 to 1977, though administration was never his strong suit, while he found teaching a joy.

In the 1950s and 60s, working in collaboration with his wife, Wagner published a series of elegant studies showing that ferns hybridise freely. The idea that plants are different from animals in the ease with which they form hybrids is now widely accepted, but at the time Wagner's proposal went against convention. With missionary zeal he exhorted botanists to tighten up their approach to the inference of phylogeny, sowing the seeds of modern cladistics with his method for plotting species relationships and character changes in an explicit, testable way. He developed this 'Ground-Plan Divergence Index' while attempting to infer the ancestors of the Hawaiian fern genus Diellia. This seminal contribution to systematic biology was recognised by several awards and the moniker 'Wagner Tree' for representing phylogenetic relationships in this way.

Wagner's many honours included election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985 and the Asa Gray Award from the American Society of Plant Taxonomists in 1990. He served as chair and president of nine professional societies, including the Botanical Society of America (1977), and served as an editor on the Flora of North America (co-editing the Pteridophytes in volume two). His enthusiasm was renowned and after giving talks he would surprise his audience by sitting down at the piano and proceeding to play lively honky-tonk. An active field worker throughout his life, his last collections were made in the summer before his death in south-western Canada, where he and Florence found a new species of Botrychium (moonwort). The couple had two children, Margaret and Warren.

Sources:
W.R. Anderson, 2000, "Warren H. Wagner, Jr., 1911-2000", Plant Science Bulletin, 46(1): 17-18
D.R. Farrar, 2000, "Warren H. Wagner, Jr. (1920-2000), Taxon, 49(3): 585-592
D.R. Farrar, 2002, American Fern Journal, 92(2): 39-49.