Biography

United States botanist. David Grandison Fairchild was born in East Lansing, Michigan, but grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, from the age of ten, when his father, an English professor, became president of Kansas State Agricultural College. He graduated from his father's college with BA and MA degrees and afterwards undertook postgraduate work for his uncle, Byron Halstead, a noted plant pathologist at Iowa State University, moving east with him when his uncle became a professor at Rutgers.

In 1889 Fairchild joined the office of Plant Pathology at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). After five years' service, during which he published several important studies on grape diseases, he obtained a research post at Naples Zoological Station, Italy supported by the Smithsonian Institution. On board ship he met the charismatic philanthropist and traveller Barbour Lathrop, who persuaded him to become a plant explorer and offered to sponsor a trip Fairchild wished to make to the Java Garden at Buitenzorg. Lathrop had encountered many valuable foreign fruits, vegetables, and trees on his world travels, which he wanted to see introduced into the United States; because no such program was as yet being run by the USDA, Lathrop had the idea of establishing a botanical garden in Hawaii where they could be grown.

Fairchild eventually accepted Lathrop's offer, and to prepare himself for his new career studied botany at various universities in Germany (with Ferdinand Cohn in Breslau, Oscar Brefeld in Munster, and Eduard Strasburger in Bonn). After eight months researching termite gardens in Java, he was taken by Lathrop on a long journey through the South Pacific, calling in at various countries on their way to Hawaii. Once there, however, they failed to raise any interest in their project for a botanical garden of economic plants. Undeterred, Fairchild managed to persuade the Secretary of Agriculture in Washington of the importance of their scheme and was provided with funds from Congress for a Plant Introduction Service, which he set up with fellow plant explorer Walter T. Swingle. Soon afterwards, in an effort to establish contacts for the new section, he obtained two years' leave to travel the world with Lathrop, who financed the trip.

These early travels, recounted by Fairchild in The World Was My Garden (1938), set the stage for his long career as a plant explorer. In all, his field work for the USDA in Asia, the South Pacific, Dutch East and West Indies, South America, Egypt, Ceylon, China, Japan, the Persian Gulf, and East and South Africa resulted in the introduction of some 30,000 varieties and species of plants into the United States, including flowering cherries, pistachios, East Indian mangoes, alfalfa, avocados, bamboos, horseradish, Chinese soy bean, nectarines, and dates.

In 1905 Fairchild married Marian Hubbard Bell, the youngest daughter of the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and settled in Chevy Chase, Washington DC. In 1915 he received an honorary doctorate from Oberlin College. He continued to travel the world collecting plants, sometimes in the company of his family, and later cultivated many of the tropical species collected on these trips at 'The Kampong', his family's summer home in Coconut Grove, Florida, which is now part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. The family settled there permanently after Fairchild retired from active service in 1935, and in 1947 he published the book about the residence, The World Grows Round My Door. Fairchild was the author of two other books, Exploring for Plants (1930) and The Garden Islands of the Great East (1943), as well as scientific papers on plants and plant introduction, and an early work on the macrophotography of insects entitled The Book of Monsters (1914), which he co-authored with his wife.

In later years many of Fairchild's collecting trips were financed by Allison Armor, who in 1923 had a floating botanical laboratory built especially to sail the coast and islands that Fairchild wanted to study more carefully. From 1924 to 1927 the Fairchilds and Armor voyaged continuously about Africa and on to Ceylon, the Moluccas, Indonesia, South America, and the West Indies.

Sources:
G. Clement, "David Grandison Fairchild", Everglades Biographies: http://everglades.fiu.edu/reclaim/bios/fairchild.htm
M.S. Douglas, 1973, Adventures in a Green World: The Story of David Fairchild and Barbour Lathrop.