Top Botanist, Beloved Professor Dies at 86

Richard A. Howard, a Harvard botanist known for exotic travels and innovative lectures, died at his home in Weston, Mass. on Sept. 18. He was 86.

Howard, who was professor emeritus of dendrology, also directed the University’s Arnold Arboretum for 24 years. He was well known for his teaching—which took the study of botany to restaurants and grocery stores in Boston.

“He probably did more than any botanist I know to bring botany to the people,” said Emily Wood, manager of the systematics collections at the Harvard Herbaria, who worked under Howard.

Born in Stamford, Conn. on July 1, 1917, Howard attended Miami University of Ohio before completing his graduate studies at Harvard in 1942.

His teaching career at Harvard spanned half a century. Between 1948 and 1988, he served terms as assistant professor, director of the Arnold Arboretum and professor of dendrology.

Howard published over 300 scientific papers and 13 books in his lifetime, garnering honors from the American Herb Society, the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences in Denmark and the Garden Club of America.

The world was Howard’s laboratory. Over the course of five decades, he traveled to far-flung places all over the globe, but was best known for his research in the Caribbean, which produced a six-volume work entitled Flora of the Lesser Antilles, the most extensive record of plant life in the region to date.

“He was in areas that no longer exist, because of development and politics and all sorts of things,” said Donald H. Pfister, director of the Herbaria. “He might have had the last glimpse in certain parts of those islands before they were destroyed.”

His travels also involved collecting plant specimens around volcanoes.

In 1972, Howard and his son, Bruce, who was in high school at the time, took a trip to the Soufriere Hills Volcano in Montserrat in search of a now-extinct plant.

“I remember trekking all day up the volcano. It was smoking, steaming at that point,” Bruce R. Howard said. “And he had me out front searching for this plant. I had no idea what it looked like.”

At one point during the expedition, Bruce Howard said he pointed to a plant near the rim of the volcano. To his father’s delight, the find turned out to be a new species of flowering plant.

“He was great at describing plants. He had told me what to look for, and I kind of stumbled upon it,” Bruce Howard said of his father.

Howard’s expertise in botany proved useful during World War II. Serving in the Army, Howard produced survival manuals that taught soldiers downed in the Pacific to live off the land in extreme conditions.

“Men just back from fighting in the Pacific kept bringing strange problems to Howard when they learned he was a botanist. What should they eat if forced down in the jungle?” a 1953 article published in Newsweek read.

For the rest of Howard’s life, botany and international affairs often seemed to cross paths. When opportunities for exchange between American and Chinese botanists opened up around 1980, Howard was among the first 20 delegates to travel there, according to David Boufford, assistant director for collections at the Harvard Herbaria, who also worked with Howard.

Professor of Biology Noel M. Holbrook ’82 traveled with Howard on his trip to Cuba in the late 1990s to visit a famous botanical garden which Harvard managed prior to the Cuban Revolution.

“He walked around the garden he hadn’t been [to] in 40 plus years,” Holbrook said. “We stood in a bamboo grove, and he remembered when it had been planted.”

On campus, Howard’s lectures were popular for both the subject matter and his teaching style.

Wood said that Howard’s main fields—plant morphology and anatomy—were “big subjects” during his time as a professor.

But those close to him said Howard’s lecture style was also engaging and unique.

“There are some people who walk into a room, and they’re there, and you feel their presence,” Wood said. “I think Dr. Howard was like that.”

Howard’s lectures, many of which were open to the public, included field trips to grocery stores and restaurants. In a lecture entitled “Botany in Boston Restaurants,” Howard described plants as they were served to his audience.

Boufford said that Howard also incorporated his collection of about 65,000 slides—most of which he photographed himself during his travels to exotic islands in the Caribbean and across the globe—into his lectures.

“He just had tons of stories,” said Holbrook, who took Howard’s graduate level class on plant anatomy in the 1980s. Holbrook said Howard had the class over to his house for dinner at the end of the course.

“All the foods were listed botanically. Instead of the menu using culinary terms, it was describing the type of plant,” she said.

Holbrook said she ate some unusual plants that night, including a fruit that could only be found in the Caribbean.

“If you ate it when it wasn’t exactly ripe, it could kill you,” she remembered. But she said “there was never any question that he would know when to pick it correctly.”

Howard is survived by four children—Barbara Howard, Bruce Howard, Philip Howard, and Jean Howard Rodriguez, and eight grandchildren.