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[Ellen A. Dean]

Dear Taxacomers. I went to Ledyard Stebbins' memorial last Sunday, and
there were many funny stories about his driving and singleness of purpose
when in the field. I was too shy to get up in person to tell people about
some of my experiences with Ledyard over the past 4 years (since I became
head of the herbarium at UC Davis), but I thought that Taxacom readers
might be glad to know that Ledyard asked that memorial contributions in his
name should be made to the UC Davis Herbarium. I thought that this was
interesting, because if you read the NY Times obituary, the writer said
"Professor Stebbins entered Harvard graduate school to study botany in
1926. At the time, the field of botany was undergoing changes. Once
confined to studying dusty herbarium specimens, botanists interested in
plant species and their relationships were discovering the modern
techniques available for studying chromosomes and genetics." Well, despite
herbaria just being repositories of "dusty specimens", Ledyard was one of
our great supporters. The UC Davis Herbarium houses thousands of Stebbins
collections, including all of his vouchers from Stebbins Cold Canyon
Reserve, and I still am trying to locate his field notebooks, so that I can
process his specimens from the last 20 years. For his 90th birthday, he had
contributions sent to the UC Davis Herbarium so that we could begin
administering a student grant in his name (part of our larger student grant
program). These grants are to be used for field botany projects that result
in specimens that will be deposited in the UC Davis Herbarium. Any monetary
contributions made to the herbarium in Ledyards name will be used to
continue the G. Ledyard Stebbins student grant program.

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Ellen Dean
Director/Curator
UC Davis Herbarium
Section of Plant Biology
University of California at Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, California 95616
530-759-1091
eadean at ucdavis.edu
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