Archives West Finding Aid

Harold St. John was born in 1895 and attended Harvard University, graduating in 1914. Graduate education, work with a Canadian botanical survey and service in the United States army occupied him until 1920, when he received the Ph. D. from Harvard and accepted a teaching position at the State College of Washington, now Washington State University.

St. John had been a student of Merritt L. Fernald and Benjamin Robinson, the successors of Asa Gray at Harvard and the leaders of the International Rule school among American botanists. His early experience also placed considerable emphasis on field botany. Not surprisingly he became close associated of Wilhelm Suksdorf, of whom he wrote a biography.

In conjunction with such Washington botanists as Suksdorf, he began planning for a revised survey of the state’s plants in the early 1920s. Originally he had intended to produce an updated edition of Piper and Beattie’s Flora of Southeast Washington. Piper encouraged the project but died shortly after it began. St. John accordingly began to work on lines of his own, preparing a new work which ultimately appeared in 1936, by which time St. John had moved to a position at the University of Hawaii.

The 1936 Flora of Southeast Washington quickly became the standard field and herbarium guide to the vegetation of the inland Northwest and a later edition remains in wide use in the mid-1970s. The guide was characterized by what the author saw as a rigid application of the International Rule, although it also documents the extent to which the nomenclature dispute had been resolved by the mid-1930s. It also contains many references to regional and ecological variations among species, and other such ideas, which began to supersede the nomenclature dispute as one of the main development in botany. The impact of genetics, however, was little noted in the book.

As with R. Kent Beattie, St. John saw himself as a direct successor of C. V. Piper, although he took the opposite direction of Beattie in the nomenclature dispute. Consequently he remained more of a describer of an guide to plants than did Beattie who essentially became a botanical historian. As Piper’s successor, St. John was quite successful, being the most prominent certain amount of criticism for certain philosophic stands. His major failure occurred when the attempted to inspire a second generation Flora of Western Washington and could not induce anyone to complete it.

St. John remained at the University of Hawaii until retirement in 1958, after which he held various visiting assignments.