Timothy Charles Plowman
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| Timothy Charles Plowman | |
|---|---|
 Plowman 2664, a cannabis plant collected as a weed in a garden on the Plaza de Armas of Santiago, Chile, on 9 April 1969 (Naturalis Biodiversity Center, L.1592596, CC0)
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| Born | 17 November 1944 |
| Died | 7 January 1989 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Botanist and ethnobotanist |
| Institutions | Botanical Museum of Harvard University; Field Museum of Natural History |
| Known for | Systematics and ethnobotany of coca (Erythroxylum); the three-species treatment of Cannabis (1974) |
| Collector name on accessions | T.C. Plowman |
| Botanical author abbreviation | Plowman |
Timothy Charles Plowman (17 November 1944 – 7 January 1989) was an American ethnobotanist. He trained under Richard Evans Schultes at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University and later worked at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where he chaired the Department of Botany from 1986 to 1988.[1]: 119, 121[2] The Field Museum Library calls him the world authority on Erythroxylum, the genus of coca.[2] In 1969 he collected a cannabis plant growing as a weed in Santiago, Chile. In 1972, with Schultes and Tom Lockwood, he collected herbarium vouchers from the cannabis garden of the University of Mississippi, grown from seed of many origins. He was the third of the four authors of "Cannabis: an example of taxonomic neglect" (1974), which divided the genus into three species, C. sativa, C. indica and C. ruderalis.[3]
His standard label name is T. C. Plowman. His botanical author abbreviation is Plowman.[4][5]
Harvard and the Botanical Museum
Plowman grew up in the woodlands around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. After college at Cornell University he went to the Botanical Museum as a graduate student under Schultes, who sent him on an expedition to the Amazon before he enrolled. He came back from Brazil in the autumn of 1966.[1]: 119 Plowman and Wade Davis were both students of Schultes.[6] The first of his field notebooks, inscribed with the Botanical Museum's address, numbers his collections from 24 June 1966, when he was collecting for the Anasazi Origins Project in Sandoval County, New Mexico.[7] By 1974 he was a research fellow in economic botany there.[3]: 337 He collected in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, the United States and Venezuela.[4] In 1974 and 1975 he and Davis spent 15 months on expeditions together.[6]
He received his master's degree in 1970. His doctoral dissertation was a revision of Brunfelsia, a genus of the nightshade family, with a chapter on its ethnobotany, and rested on more than 15 months of continuous fieldwork in Central and South America and the Caribbean. The doctorate was conferred in 1974.[1]: 119 Natalia Filipowicz, Michael Nee and Susanne Renner called his work on it in the 1970s and 1980s "the first and only comprehensive treatment of the genus". His revision of the South American species appeared in 1998, nine years after his death.[8]
Cannabis
On 9 April 1969 Plowman collected a cannabis plant on the Plaza de Armas of Santiago, Chile. The plant was a herb 2.5 to 3.0 metres tall, growing as a weed in a garden. The gathering is his number 2664 (Plowman 2664 (1969)); his field notebook enters it under 9 April 1969 at Santiago.[9] Sheets of it are held in Leiden by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center (L.1592596) and in Washington by the National Museum of Natural History (US 2710606).[10][11]
On 31 July and 1 August 1972 Schultes, Plowman and Lockwood collected sheets in the National Institute of Mental Health Cannabis Garden of the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy.[12] Their labels at Harvard read R. E. Schultes, T. C. Plowman, & T. E. Lockwood for the collectors, carry a plant number such as 82 A and name the seed lot in a remark, such as K A - Korean, original sample.[13] Loran C. Anderson later put the 1972 sampling at 237 specimens from 32 seed sources, with vouchers at the Botanical Museum.[14] Ernest Small and Arthur Cronquist cited sheets of the series by their "Schultes, Plowman & Lockwood" numbers, with duplicates at Ottawa (DAO) and Harvard (ECON), under France, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Morocco, South Africa, Mexico and other countries, each with its Quimby acquisition code.[15]: 423, 428–429
The 1974 paper appeared in the Botanical Museum's Leaflets under the names of Schultes, William M. Klein of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Plowman and Lockwood, then an assistant professor of botany at the University of Illinois.[3]: 337 The authors wrote that the literature, herbarium material from many areas, preliminary fieldwork in Afghanistan and a survey of cannabis grown in Mississippi from seed imported from many parts of the world had convinced them that the genus is not monotypic.[3]: 341–342 They separated the three species by growth habit. They wrote that their collections and studies in the Mississippi plantation showed these habits to be genetically stable.[3]: 356 The paper was reprinted in 1975 in Cannabis and Culture.[16]
American appeal courts cited the paper under all four names when defendants argued that the marijuana statutes, which named Cannabis sativa L., did not cover other species. The First Circuit cited it in United States v. Honneus (1974), the California Court of Appeal in People v. Van Alstyne (1975) and the Minnesota Supreme Court in State v. Vail (1979).[17][18][19]
Cannabis specimens
Plowman also collected cannabis in Roxbury, Massachusetts, on 1 October 1973, with sheets at the Smithsonian (US 2852239) and the Missouri Botanical Garden (MO 105477166).[20][21] On 17 June 1974 he and C. J. Sheviak collected it below Reavis Spring Hill Prairie, south of Easton in Mason County, Illinois (US 2815841).[22]
Accessions collected by Plowman:
Coca and the Field Museum
The Field Museum Library dates his years as a curator of botany at the museum to 1976–1987.[2] Davis's memoriam dates his move from Harvard to the Field Museum to 1978, his tenure to 1983 and his appointment as curator to 1988.[1]: 119 In 1981 the title page of his Five new species of Brunfelsia from South America described him as assistant curator of vascular plants in its Department of Botany.[23] His expeditions of the 1980s, to Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, enlarged the museum's South American collections.[24] Over his career he spent more than five years in the field in the Andes and the Amazon and made over 15,000 collections.[1]: 121 He chaired the museum's Department of Botany from 1986 to 1988. From 1984 to 1988 he was co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and scientific editor of Fieldiana. He was a co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation's Projeto Flora Amazônica and a Fellow of the Linnean Society.[1]: 120–121
The neotropical species of Erythroxylum occupied him in systematic and ethnobotanical study for about the last 15 years of his life. He published about 50 papers on the genus and gathered over 700 of its specimens in South America. By Davis's count, 46 of his 80 published scientific papers concerned the genus.[1]: 119 The account of the genus he was writing for Flora Neotropica was never finished.[25] The Field Museum Library has digitised his field books and added them to the Biodiversity Heritage Library.[2]
Death and legacy
Plowman died on 7 January 1989.[1]: 119[26] Davis gave the eulogy at his memorial service, where Schultes spoke in a taped message. The service led Davis to write One River (1996), a book about Schultes, Plowman and Davis himself.[6] In 2012 a species of Brunfelsia from the Andes of Bolivia and Argentina was named Brunfelsia plowmaniana in his honour.[8]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Davis, Wade (Summer 1989). "Timothy Charles Plowman 17 November 1944–7 January 1989". Journal of Ethnobiology. 9 (1): 119–126 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 "Timothy Plowman field books". FromThePage. Field Museum Library. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Schultes, R.E.; Klein, W.M.; Plowman, T.; Lockwood, T.E. (1974). "Cannabis: an example of taxonomic neglect". Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University. 23: 337–367 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Plowman, Timothy Charles". Index of Botanists. Harvard University Herbaria. Botanist ID 11596. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Plowman, Timothy Charles (1944–1989)". International Plant Names Index. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Harvard University Herbaria; Australian National Herbarium. Author ID 7761-1. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "On distant high ways". Times Higher Education. 13 June 1997. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ Plowman, Timothy. Timothy Plowman botanical collecting notebook: 1–1868, 1965–1978 (Field notebook). Field Museum of Natural History Library. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.135406. BOT_Plowman001 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Filipowicz, Natalia; Nee, Michael; Renner, Susanne (2012). "Description and molecular diagnosis of a new species of Brunfelsia (Solanaceae) from the Bolivian and Argentinean Andes". PhytoKeys. 10: 83–94. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.10.2558.
- ↑ Plowman, Timothy. Timothy Plowman botanical collecting notebook: 2287–2699, 1969 (Field notebook). Field Museum of Natural History Library. doi:10.5962/bhl.title.136000. BOT_Plowman003 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "Specimen L.1592596". Naturalis Bioportal. Naturalis Biodiversity Center. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cannabis sativa L., US 2710606". NMNH Botany Collections. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 5 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 1321787432: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Cannabis sativa subsp. indica, barcode 00449601". Index of Botanical Specimens. Harvard University Herbaria. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
- ↑ Anderson, L.C. (1980). "Leaf variation among Cannabis species from a controlled garden". Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University. 28 (1): 61–69. doi:10.5962/p.168641.
- ↑ Small, Ernest; Cronquist, Arthur (August 1976). "A practical and natural taxonomy for Cannabis". Taxon. 25 (4): 405–435. doi:10.2307/1220524.
- ↑ Schultes, Richard Evans; Klein, William M.; Plowman, Timothy; Lockwood, Tom E. (1975). "Cannabis: an example of taxonomic neglect". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 21–38. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.21.
- ↑ United States v. Honneus 508 F.2d 566. United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (24 December 1974). No. 74-1112. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ People v. Van Alstyne 46 Cal. App. 3d 900. Court of Appeal of the State of California (8 April 1975). Crim. No. 25231. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ State v. Vail 274 N.W.2d 127. Minnesota Supreme Court (12 January 1979). No. 47427. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 1320387774: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 6561763441: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 1317995730: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Plowman, Timothy". Library of Congress Name Authority File. Library of Congress. n82033247. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Seed Plants - History". Field Museum. Field Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Erythroxylum". Field Museum. Field Museum of Natural History. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ Davis, Wade (July 1989). "Timothy Charles Plowman 17 November 1944–7 January 1989". Economic Botany. 43 (3): 416–418. doi:10.1007/BF02858737.