PBIO 250 Lecture Notes -- History -- Spring 1998: John Hutchinson (original) (raw)

John Hutchinson proposed one of the most novel of the modern systems of angiosperm classification in the 20th century, dividing the dicotyledonous plants into fundamentally woody and herbaceous groups. It was to be both his badge of recognition and his bane.

Born on 7 April 1884 in Northumberland, he grew up with plants as his father was a gardener, and so was John when, in 1904, he arrived at Kew. It was while working in the potting sheds that he first met Joseph Dalton Hooker, friend of Darwin, and at the time Director of the Garden.

His quick move from the garden to the herbarium began a career in systematics that was to last until his death on 2 September 1972. He published the first part of his Families of Flowering Plants in 1926 treating the docotyledonous plants. The second part, on the monocotyledons, was published in 1934. At this time he noted the fundamental differences between the woody and herbaceous dicots, but only in a diagram as he maintained a more traditional view of the dicotyledons in the linear sequence presented in his book based largely on Hooker's model published as an appendix to his wife's English translation of Le Maout and Decaisne.

The 1934 treatment of the monocotyledonous angiosperms was a marked departure from either that presented by Hooker or that outlined by Engler and Prantl. Hutchinson's views are still largely followed, and it is this aspect of his system that has persisted to the present day.

While engaged in his review of the monocots, Hutchinson was also involved in the production of the Flora of West Tropical Africa in collaboration with John McEwen Dalziel, accounting for some 6000 species with concise descriptions and informative illustrations. When the last volume of the Flora was published, John became Keeper of the Museums at Kew, a position he held until his retirement in 1948. In 1947, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Free of administrative duties, John Hutchinson was able to turn his attention to an even more detailed review of the flowering plants. In 1959 he published a second edition of his Families, and this time he totally rearranged the linear sequence of the flowering plant families so as to reflect his view of woodiness versus herbaceousness. It was to result in a near total rejection of his work in spite of the fact that he provided concise descriptions of the families and a workable key. Unfazed, he continued to maintain the arrangement, publishing an interesting summary of the dicots in 1969.

In 1964 he published the first volume of his Genera of Flowering Plants in the hopes of some how being able to provide a modern revision of Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarium. He established for himself an impossible task. Each new genus was described based on his own observations, with synonymy and distribution noted. Keys were provided as well. The last volume, the third, was published after his death.

In 1972, John was awarded the Order of the British Empire, a fitting tribute to one who had devoted his entire life to British botany.

When this picture was taken, in March of 1972, John Hutchinson was nearing the start of his 88th year and busily engaged in completing the third volume of his work on the genera of flowering plants. He had a desk in front of a large window on the second floor of the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and brought out his old binocular microscope so that it might be included in my effort to take his picture. First and foremost a field collector, Hutchinson knew many of the families of flowering plants from direct observations. What he did not see in his travels, he saw growing at Kew. He illustrated most of his own works with his own drawings, most done from living material. The original art work for the cover of his 1969 book, Evolution and phylogeny of flowering plants, is preserved at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, drawn and painted by himself.

In an obituary published in Taxon, John Brenan stated that his "kindness, particularly to young people, was boundless" and to this I can attest. He took me under his care on my first visit to Kew and quietly told me wonderful stories about the characters in the tea room, many of whom were then and still are botanical gods although John had tales to make them all more human. He was not vindictive, save maybe in his comments about Dr. Airy Shaw, his competitor at Kew in the classification of plants, but even then there was the spark in his eyes that said much beyond the few words he used to characterize the other.