As curator of the Neil A. Harriman Herbarium at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Thomas Lammers keeps current by reading an array of botany journals.
Usually he makes note of anything that might enhance the herbarium’s collection of more than 115,000 prepared plant specimens from around the world. And as a recognized expert in the flowering plant family Campanulaceae, Lammers is attuned to articles about bellflowers.
However, one recent article in the Harvard Papers in Botany caught his eye. The article was a new plant species that had nothing to do with his field of expertise.
What he saw was an article about a new plant species — the Ardisia lammersiana — from Indonesian Papua discovered by Wayne Takeuchi, a botanist Lammers had known when he was conducting field study in Hawaii in 1983.
Unbeknownst to Lammers, his former associate in Hawaiian botany had named the new plant after him.
Lammers, an associate professor in the Department of Biology and Microbiology, is the author of “World Checklist and Bibliography of Campanulaceae,” the first book to be published since 1839 that provides an encyclopedic bibliography of this plant family.
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