Gerald Ernest Wickens B.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D., F.L.S. (18 December 1927 - 11 March 2019) was a British botanist.
Biography
Born
Marylebone in 1927 and attended
Ealing
Ealing () is a district in West London, England, west of Charing Cross in the London Borough of Ealing. Ealing is the administrative centre of the borough and is identified as a major metropolitan centre in the London Plan.
Ealing was histor ...
County High School. Following army service (1946-1948) he followed a career in agriculture and conservation in Africa. He served in the Africa Agriculture Department from 1952 and joined Hunting Technical Services (1962-66) in
Sudan
Sudan ( or ; ar, السودان, as-Sūdān, officially the Republic of the Sudan ( ar, جمهورية السودان, link=no, Jumhūriyyat as-Sūdān), is a country in Northeast Africa. It shares borders with the Central African Republic t ...
where he was team leader and ecologist for a study of
Jebel Marra, an isolated massif.
In 1967 he worked at the
Herbarium
A herbarium (plural: herbaria) is a collection of preserved plant specimens and associated data used for scientific study.
The specimens may be whole plants or plant parts; these will usually be in dried form mounted on a sheet of paper (called ...
at
Kew Gardens, continuing to work on African plants, especially
Combretaceae,
Melastomataceae and
Crassulaceae. He was awarded a Ph.D. from
Reading University in 1972 for his theses "The Flora of Jebel Marra". In 1981 worked on the Survey of Economic Plants for Arid and Semi-Arid Tropics (SEPASAT). From 1983 he headed the Economic and Conservation Section of the Herbarium (ECOS), which included directing the cataloguing of the Economic Botany collection, rehousing from the museums to the Sir Joseph Banks building, digitisation of the Kew Economic Botany Bibliographic Database and also managing the Conservation Policy team including
CITES.
He published over 120 scientific papers and is noted particularly for the Flora of Jebel Marra (1976) and The
Baobabs
''Adansonia'' is a genus made up of eight species of medium-to-large deciduous trees known as baobabs ( or ). They are placed in the Malvaceae family, subfamily Bombacoideae. They are native to Madagascar, mainland Africa, and Australia.Tropi ...
(2008).
He married his wife Susan (Mimi Stammers, b 1937), who worked in the Library at Kew, in
Richmond Catholic Church (1969) and had a son, David (b 1970). He retired in 1987 and moved to
Aylsham in Norfolk, where he died 2019 in
Cromer.
[
]
Selected publications
* Flora of Tropical East Africa : Melastomataceae. (1975). Royal Botanic Gardens.
* Flora of Jebel Marra (Sudan Republic) and its Geographical Affinities. (1976). Royal Botanic Gardens
* Baobab - Africa's Upside-Down Tree. (1982)
* Economic Botany: Principles and Practices Hardcover. (2001)
* Checklist of the British and Irish Basidiomycota. (2005). G. E. Wickens, N. W. Legon, A. Henrici, P. J. Roberts, B. M. Spooner, R. Watling, Royal Botanic Gardens.
* The Baobabs: The Pachycauls of Africa, Madagascar and Australia. (2008). Gerald E. Wickens, Pat Lowe
* Ecophysiology of Economic Plants in Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (Adaptations of Desert Organisms). (2010)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wickens, Gerald Ernest
Botanists with author abbreviations
British botanists
People from Marylebone
Botanists active in Kew Gardens
1927 births
2019 deaths