By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on June 13, 2008
Someone reminded me the other day that I have neglected the series of articles about the botanists whose names are immortalized in the names of our native plants. It’s high time we resumed those installments on historic Texas botanists.
Four of last year’s columns discussed a few of the Nineteenth Century botanists who made Texas flora famous around the world. The names of these men are familiar to us today, because they are used in the common and scientific names of many of our native plants. Jean Louis Berlandier, Thomas Drummond, Ferdinand Lindheimer, George Engelmann, and Ferdinand Roemer all are honored in the names of Texas native plants.
Another surname used frequently by the taxonomists who chose names for Texas plants is “Wright,” as in Wright’s acacia, Wright’s anisacanthus, Wright’s cliff-brake, Wright’s evening primrose, Wright’s false mallow, Wright’s milkvetch, Wright’s pavonia, Wright’s plantain, Wright’s skullcap, Wright’s threeawn, and Wright’s tick-clover. The species name for most of these plants is wrighti or wrightii.
These botanical names acknowledge the considerable contributions of Charles Wright, a Connecticut Yankee who made plant collections in Texas during the mid 1800s.
After graduating from Yale University in 1831, Wright moved to Natchez, Louisiana to tutor children of a sugarcane planter. Later he moved to Zavala, Texas, where he taught school and surveyed some of the counties in what is now Deep East Texas. Later he moved west to be the surveyor for Menard County.
Apparently he had developed an interest in botany as a young man, because he botanized and collected specimens as he traveled around East Texas and the Menard County area. In 1844, Wright began a forty-year correspondence with Asa Gray, a professor of natural history at Harvard and coauthor of “Flora of North America.”
In 1845, Wright took an administrative and teaching job at the first college to open in Texas, the Methodist Rutersville College in Fayette County. Later he moved to Austin to teach and collect specimens of native plants.
Asa Gray arranged for Wright to conduct a botanical expedition by traveling with US troops moving across the Rio Grande Valley to El Paso during the spring of 1849. “This expedition is of special interest because the Smithsonian’s $150 contribution to defray Wright’s expenses was, according to some, one of the early steps taken by that institution toward the formation of a national herbarium” (page 64, “Illustrated Flora of North Central Texas”).
Charles Wright walked the 673 miles to El Paso, collecting and preserving specimens under difficult and frustrating conditions. Wright sent 1,400 species of Texas plants to Gray at Harvard and also shipped many specimens of cacti to Engelmann at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Wright’s 1849 collection was a major contribution to the botany of Texas.
After that expedition, he taught in San Marcos and then in New Braunfels, where he befriended Ferdinand Lindheimer. Then he joined Col. Graham’s survey of the Mexico-US boundary. The results of Wright’s extensive collections from Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona were published in Asa Gray’s “Plantae Wrightianae, Parts 1 and 2, Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 3 and 5,” as well as in other reports by John Torrey and George Englemann.
Wright served as botanist on an 1853 expeditions to many parts of the North Pacific, before returning home to Wethersfield, Connecticut. In 1856, still unencumbered by a wife and family, he began an 11-year botanical exploration of Cuba. Later he worked at Harvard’s Gray Herbarium.
At his death in 1885, Charles Wright had become one of the best-known US botanists.
