Hunterdon Hills Garden Club

Robbin C. Moran
The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York 10458-5126 U.S.A. (rmoran@nybg.org)
 
The Peter Raven award was established to recognize the career-long efforts of a systematic botanist to teach, lecture, and educate the public about the importance of plants. When it comes to ferns, no one has done more in this regard than John T. Mickel. He is well known among amateur and professional
botanists and horticulturists for promoting the study of ferns and their cultivation. Among his scientific colleagues he is known internationally for the many books (11) and scientific papers (over 100) he has published throughouthis career.
 
John was born on 9 September 1934 in Hudson, Ohio. His father was head of Social Studies Department at Western Reserve Academy. His mother, a housewife, stimulated his early interest in biology by imparting her interest in birds.
 
John was a childhood friend of Andre F. Clewell who, like John, also became a professional botanist later in life. The two of them shared an early interest in ornithology, astronomy, and geology. At age 14, John was asked to serve for one week as a councilor at a Scout camp because of his knowledge about birds. Soon after he arrived, however, he was also asked to give a nature hike to a group of younger scouts and explain the uses and identification of ten native trees.
 
Knowing little about this subject, he started learning about plants and eventually got hooked on botany. John continued to work as a camp councilor through college. “Teaching at camp was a wonderful experience,” said John. “It taught me about public speaking, teaching in general, and helped me build confidence. Before, I was very shy.”
 
John attended Oberlin College in Ohio and graduated in 1956 with a B.A. in botany. He went straight into graduate school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he supported himself by working as an assistant in the herbarium under the supervision of Rogers McVaugh. One day while working in the herbarium, he met the indomitable Warren Herb Wagner, Jr., who almost immediately told him that he should be studying ferns. John was given the experience of a life time when he accompanied McVaugh for three months on a collecting trip in western Mexico. The trip familiarized John with fern taxonomy and was the inspiration for what would become a life-long research interest: the floristics of Mexican ferns. Herb Wagner eventually became John’s major professor, and set John to work on monograph of Anemia subgen. Coptophyllum for his doctoral dissertation.  John has always been an inveterate punster, and this was evident during his dissertation work. He discovered a new type of stomatal apparatus in Anemia, which he informally dubbed “Mickel-cell Anemia.” When it came time to give a university-wide lecture about his dissertation work, he titled the talk “Blood lines in Anemia.”
 
Also as a graduate student, John took summer courses and worked as an assistant in the plant systematics course at the University of Michigan’s Douglas Lake Biological Station.His duties as an assistant often required him to work in the station’s office at night, and that is where he met his wife-to-be, Carol Stroud, who was then working as a secretary in the office. They were married about one year later.  John graduated with his Ph.D. in 1961 and took a job as an Assistant Professor of Botany at Iowa State University, Ames.  There his family grew: his sons Jeff and Paul were born and, while on a one-year sabbatical at the Smithsonian, his thirdson Tim was born. In 1967 John found time to organize the first pteridology course in Costa Rica for the Organization for Tropical Studies—a course he cotaught with Herb Wagner.  John stayed in Iowa until 1969 when he moved to The New York Botanical Garden to become Curator of Ferns. In 1974 John and Carol added a new member to their family, adopting a Korean girl who they named Jean. John spent the rest of his career at the Garden, becoming Curator Emeritus in 2005.  One of John’s most important contributions to public outreach was founding and, for 20 yr, editing the Fiddlehead Forum, the popular bulletin of the American Fern Society. He started the bulletin because the American Fern Journal was accepting only scientific articles, and no outlet existed for subjects of interest to amateurs and fern growers. The Fiddlehead Forum was (and still is) vital to the health of the American Fern Society, most of whose members are nonscientists.  Editing the newsletter took a lot of time, especially in precomputer days, and John was assisted in this task by Carol.
 
Besides editing, John wrote many articles explaining facets of fern biology and horticulture. The Fiddlehead Forum has probably done more to foster understanding of ferns among the general public than anything else. Many pteridologists nowadays can remember avidly reading issues of it when they first became interested in ferns.  Another of John’s important contributions to pteridology and public outreach was founding the New York Fern Society
in January 1973. He still organizes and runs their monthly meetings that take place at The New York Botanical Garden the first Saturday of every month from October to May. Scott Mori, upon introducing John as the recipient of this year’s Peter Raven Award, had this to say about these meetings: “I always knew when those meetings were taking place because Robbin Moran, Tom Zanoni, Jim Montgomery, and John and Carol started setting up the chairs, the slide projector, and making the coffee in the lunch room area just outside my office for the 30-50 fern lovers that attended the meetings.  When the meeting started, I was periodically interrupted by peels of laughter, usually set off by John’s repertoire of puns.”  During the summer months when it was not meeting, the Fern Society sponsored local field trips to see ferns. John led longer trips for Fern Society members to Costa Rica, Guatemala, Trinidad, and Oaxaca, Mexico. To the latter destination he led field trips three times, the third (2000) having been written up in book form, Oaxaca Journal (2002), by the prominent neurologist and best-selling author Oliver Sacks, a longtime member of the New York Fern Society.
 
John has written three books on fern identification for amateurs. Many fern enthusiasts have wielded a copy of John’s How to Know the Ferns (W. C. Brown Publisher, 1979). This book, with its nation-wide coverage, has probably been used by more lay people than any other fern book. Its directness and clarity of presentation make it still useful nowadays. The book includes an introductory chapter that is one of the clearest explanations for lay people about various aspects of fern biology such as the life cycle, polyploidy, hybridization, and
apogamy. John also published a field guide to the common ferns of Trinidad, and he revised The Southern Fern Guide, by Edgar T. Wherry, a book still widely used in the Gulf States. Besides promoting general fern knowledge and identification, John has encouraged fern horticulture. He often gives talks on fern cultivation to garden clubs, fern societies, and native plant societies around the country. He has published two major books on the subject: Home Gardener’s Book of Ferns (Ridge Press/Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1979), and Ferns for American Gardens (Macmillan, 1994; reprinted by Timber Press, 2003). The latter was selected by the American Horticultural Society as one of the top 75 horticultural books published in America over the past 75 yr, and it was the only fern book selected for the list.
 
John (often assisted by Carol) has helped establish several public fern gardens: one within the Native Plant Garden at The New York Botanical Garden (also in the Garden’s Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, although the fern house there has
now been disbanded), the Rockefeller State Park Preserve, Lyndhurst Estate (a National Historic Trust site overlooking the Hudson River), the fern glen at the Carey Arboretum, and Rocky Hills in Westchester County, New York. At their home in Briarcliff Manor, New York, John and Carol have developed the finest cold-hardy temperate fern garden in the eastern United States, with over 150 species in cultivation. John advises commercial nurseries about cold-hardy temperate ferns and has introduced several new ferns to the trade such as the winged beech fern (Phegopteris decursive-pinnata), Dixie wood fern (Dryopteris ×australis), and ghost fern (apparently a hybrid between Athyrium filix-femina and A. niponicum). In recognition of his efforts, Casa Flora, a fern nursery near Dallas, Texas, has designated a selection of ferns as the “Mickel Collection.”  One of John’s major professional achievements has been his contributions to the floristics of Mexican ferns. In 1988 he published with Joseph Beitel the Pteridophyte Flora of Oaxaca, Mexico, which was followed in 1992 by the pteridophyte volume for Rogers McVaugh’s Flora Novo-Galiciana. His research on Mexican ferns culminated in 2004 with the publication (with Alan R. Smith) of the Pteridophytes of Mexico. This book, 1054 pages long, is the most complete fern flora ever written.  It describes and illustrates—with keys, dot-distribution maps, and specimens cited—all 1008 species of ferns in Mexico. For this book, John and Alan were awarded the Engler Medal in Silver by the International Association for Plant Taxonomy. This award is given for the best book published in monographic or floristic plant systematics in the year of itspublication. Even in retirement, John is active in public outreach and research. He still gives talks to plant societies and horticultural groups, and he still organizes and runs the meetings of the New York Fern Society as he has for the past 34 yr. He maintains an office on the fifth floor of the Garden’s new herbarium and is working on several projects, such as a field guide to the common ferns of Mexico (with Alan R. Smith), a monograph of Anemia, and (with me) an identification manual of the 300 most common, widespread ferns of the Neotropics.  John’s career has been a model of scientific research combined with public outreach. He has created a lasting legacy in the study of ferns and their use in horticulture, and his efforts have led many people, both amateur and professional, to study and appreciate ferns. It is fitting that the ASPT has recognized John’s life-long achievements by awarding him the Peter H. Raven Award for 2007.