Renowned botanist to speak at Kimball

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BY KATHRYN CATES MOORE/Lincoln Journal Star

For more than 35 years, Peter Raven has stepped out his front door and found himself in the middle of his work.

Living on the grounds of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis is just one of the pluses of his job as director of the facility.  And it makes his commitment to sustaining the planet easy.

Raven, 72, has successfully combined his background in plant science with his love of people, he said in a phone interview. 

“Living closer to the workplace, using more public  transportation — those are the things each individual can do,” Raven said.

That’s the very thing he will address Friday in his public lecture, “A Sustainable World: Our Shared Responsibility,” at 7:30 p.m. at Kimball Recital Hall.

Raven is not new to the ecological cause. 

When he got interested in the mid-60s,  people were just beginning to become aware, he said. “The Silent Spring,” by  Rachel Carson, was published in 1962, and for many in the academic community, that was the starting point.

Raven was already acutely aware that plants were affected by the Earth and air around them.  Making that better would certainly go a long way toward helping his beloved horticultural world, he reasoned.

At the Missouri Botanical Garden, where Raven has been since 1971, he balances world-renowned botanical research and education with 79 acres of display gardens that are supported by donations and 38,000 family memberships.

It’s been a good marriage, and one that  has  allowed him to travel the world, promoting both the facility’s research and the plants within it. 

Raven’s international interest in plant science and sustainability has earned him  a cornucopia of awards, from the 1999 “Hero of the Planet” from Time magazine to the National Medal of Science in  2001. 

The accolades are nice, he said, but they don’t compare to the wonderful opportunities he has had during his tenure at the Botanical Garden. 

Just last April, as co-editor of the  Flora of China, a joint Chinese-American project, he traveled to Yellow Mountain in Anhui Province  to see the amazing plant life there. Then later that month, he led a group to Israel to tour gardens and learn how the ecology in that country has been affected by  religious beliefs.

Even though he is surrounded by gardens at work and in his travels, Raven describes himself as only a “casual gardener.” 

Picking a favorite flower is nearly impossible, he said. He did his botanical research on the evening primrose family.

“I like them,” he said. “But I like pine trees and bell flowers and just about everything else, too.”

And much of his attention goes to plants that are not so plentiful.

There are plenty of endangered plants right here in the Midwest, Raven said. The Sandhills penstemon is one example, he said. They were known to flourish but are now being crowded out by both natural and manmade predators.

Having endangered plants cultivated in seed banks, such as the Center for Plant Conservation in St. Louis, is a start, he said. And everyone can make a difference by being conscious of preservation of natural habitats.

Reach Kathryn Cates Moore at 473-7214 or kmoore@journalstar.com.