Elmer Ottis Wooton and the Botanizing of New Mexico

Abstract

The career of E. 0. Wooton as New Mexico's first resident plant taxonomist spanned 20 years. It began in 1890 with his appointment at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Las Cruces and ended in 1911 when he was employed by the Bureau of Plant Industry in Washington, D.C. During this time, he taught classes in bacteriology, biology, botany, chemistry, geology, mineralogy, physics, physiology, and zoology, and served as State Chemist and Botanist for the Agricultural Experiment Station. He was the intellectual mentor of 0. B. Metcalfe, who collected numerous novelties from the region, and P. C. Standley, who went on to a distin- guished career with the Smithsonian Institution and the Chicago Natural History Museum. Wooton's collection trips took him throughout the territory as he built the herbarium from nothing to more than 35,000 specimens, incorporating not only his collections but also exchanges from nearly all the prominent botanists and collectors of the time, and yielding 231 plant species and one genus new to science. His botanical activities embraced not only the floristics and taxonomy of New Mexico plants, but also the reclamation and conservation of the territory's range lands. His work is reflected in his 30 publications from this era, culminating in the first floristic treatment for the state. Wooton was born 19 September 1865 in Kokomo, Indiana, and died 20 November 1945 in Arlington, Virginia. Appendices record eponymy, publications, taxa named by Wooton, and taxa named from Wooton's collections.