Howard Scott Gentry

Howard Scott Gentry (December 10, 1903 – April 1, 1993) was an American botanist, Botanical specimen plant collector, and Ethnobotany ethnobotanist. From 1950 to 1971, for the United States Department of Agriculture USDA, he worked as a plant collector, conducting 18 expeditions in 24 countries. For the year 1974 he served as president of the Society for Economic Botany. Quotes Jojoba Simmondsia chinensis is unique in many ways. Endemic to the Sonoran Desert of Mexico and the United States, its broad, persistent, heavy leaves are unlike any of its associates. Its large edible seeds contain about 50% oil, which is directly used as a cooking oil and as a hair oil. The oil has excellent qualities for many industrial and medicinal uses. Chemically it is a liquid wax and by hydrogenation is easily converted to a hard white wax. Jojoba’s singular characteristics as a Desert and xeric shrublands desert shrub, however, present many problems facing its development as a cultivated plant. July 1958 The natural history of jojoba (Simmondsia chinensis) and its cultural aspects Economic Botany 12 3 261-295 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/bf02859772 10.1007/bf02859772 In Sonora, agaves are scattered like gems in an arborescent matrix. They grow mainly upon the rocky slopes of hills and mountains and are generally lacking in the valleys and on the plains. Hence, the distributional pattern is islandlike. Compared with the massive populations of agaves in Baja California and in the Coahuilan Desert, they are very sparse in Sonora. However, they are distinctly characteristic of the succulent component in the vegetation of our America deserts and arid regions ...… Desert species exist with about 5 inches or less annual precipitation and can endure rainless years; montane species receive 30 or more inches annual precipitation. The Agave Family in Sonora Agriculture handbook no. 399, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture U.S. Agricultural Research Service 1972 https://books.google.com/books?id=NogwAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1 1 (195 pages) In North America, agave perhaps had as much to do in fostering the beginnings of agriculture as any other genus of plants. In Agaveland anyone can plant and grow agaves. All that is needed is to dig up or pull up a young offset and bury its base in moist or dry soil, with or without roots, wherever it is wanted. If it does not strike root and grow the first season, the chances are that it will the next. Carl O. Sauer Sauer (1965) has made a strong case that such transplants were the primary agricultural subjects of the Indigeneous peoples of the Americas Amerindians. Compared with seeds, the shift of useful plants from the open wild site to camp or village was more obvious and direct with transplants, and their care, protection, and culture were simpler.The hunting and gathering tribes had good reason to regard agave with special attention, because agave supplied them with food, fiber, drink, shelter, and miscellaneous natural products. Protection may have been one use, for when planted around a cottage, the larger species make armed fences, a common practice in modern Mexico. Agaves of Continental North America Book collections on Project MUSE University of Arizona Press 2004 9780816523955 https://books.google.com/books?id=SCqGyWNpRHwC&pg=PA4 4–5 (670 pages; 1st edition 1982) Quotes about Howard Scott Gentry Howard Gentry was an inspirational figure from an heroic age of arid plant science — exploring from horseback the flora of the Mayo River (Mexico) Mexican Rio Mayo in the 1930s, working on the wartime Manzanar Guayule Project#Project Background Emergency Rubber Project in the 1940s, travelling around Iran in search of gum tragacanths and around the deserts of Arizona and California in search of jojoba in the 1950s. Boyce Thompson Arboretum#Tri-Partite Agreement and state park: since 1976 William Feldman, Notes from the president The Plant Press, The Arizona Native Plant Society 17 3 Summer 1993 https://aznps.com/wp-content/uploads/PlantPress-Vol17-No3-2.pdf External links National Agricultural Library, U.S. Department of Agriculture Isabel Shipley Cunningham Collection on Howard Scott Gentry https://www.nal.usda.gov/collections/special-collections/isabel-shipley-cunningham-collection-howard-scott-gentry Category:1903 births Category:1993 deaths Category:Botanists from the United States Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Scientists from California Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:University of Michigan alumni