Biography

American botanist; renowned authority on New World Bromeliaceae. Lyman Smith spent the greater part of his career at the Smithsonian Institution and was a major contributor to the flora of Santa Catarina, Brazil. An extraordinary taxonomist and plant collector, he published over 1,500 species in more than 450 papers. Born in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, an aunt nurtured Smith’s childhood interest in botany, identifying local plants with him. Entering Harvard in the 1920s he became a keen sportsman, particularly enjoying wrestling and ice skating. He kept up the former sport well into his sixties and cycled eleven miles to work right into his seventies. In 1929 Smith married Ruth Gates, who had grown up in the same neighbourhood and together they raised five children. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1930 and became a herbarium assistant at the Gray Herbarium, often joining the New England Botanical Club on collecting trips in the greater Boston area and going further afield whenever he could. He took up a post at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. in 1947, where he remained for the rest of his career.

Smith's first major collecting trip as a student was to Canada with Merritt Fernald (1873-1950), followed by a voyage to Brazil on a Sheldon Travelling Scholarship gathering bromeliads for his thesis, in 1929. He visited Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais on this trip, and met Campos Porto, director of the Jardim Botânico in Rio, and Frederico Hoehne, founder of the São Paulo botanic garden. He did not return to South America for nearly 20 years, however, when the Rockefeller Foundation and Brazilian government sponsored him as part of the Bromeliad Malaria Campaign. (It was surmised that in Brazil mosquitoes must be breeding in bromeliads and a programme was instigated to spray their rosettes with copper sulphate; Smith was drafted in to inspect the plants in 1952.) He returned to the country in 1956, collecting over the course of a year with Raulino Reitz, a consultant on mosquito control he had met on his last visit. Together with botanist Roberto Klein they had decided to produce a flora of Brazil's southernmost state, Santa Catarina. Lyman returned to the state in 1964-1965, 1971 and 1975 to continue collecting with Reitz and Klein, observing a thoroughly changed landscape in his last two visits, as logging turned primeval vegetation into grassland.

The flora was not completed in his lifetime, but Smith contributed a substantial amount of work towards it. He also published findings from the trips of Luford Forster and his wife Racine to Brazil in 1939-1940, and was often sent bromeliads from other collectors in the New World tropics for identification. Most of his own collections came from his trips in 1929 and 1952 trips to Brazil. He also collected there in 1968 with Edward McWilliams and visited Argentina (1948), Costa Rica (1966) and Cuba (1936). He published the Bromeliaceae sections for floras of Trinidad and Tobago, Uruguay, Peru, Costa Rica, North America, Panama, Paraguay, Texas, Suriname, Guatemala, Bolivia, Venezuela, the Guyana Highlands and for Flora Neotropica as well as numerous other publications on the family and treatments of other families including Begoniaceae, Velloziaceae and Xyridaceae. On his 80th birthday the name Lymania smithii R.W. Read was published in his honour, joining the copious awards bestowed upon him up to then.

Sources:
H. Plever, 2007, "Lyman B. Smith - an appreciation" Journal of the Bromeliad Society, 57(3): 133-134
S.S. Smith, 1997, "Lyman Bradford Smith ", Taxon, 46(4): 819-824.