Studies in Oleaceae
Decades of work classifying the olive family — the plant group (olives, ash, jasmine, lilac) on which he was a world authority.
Keeper of the Herbarium, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew · 1920–2009
Peter Shaw Green (1920–2009), Keeper of the Herbarium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Looking for a different Peter Green? Maybe the guitarist. See all of them.
A Green who really did study greenery. Peter Shaw Green (1920–2009) was an English botanist and taxonomist whose career carried him from London to Birmingham, Edinburgh and Harvard before he settled at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. After six years in the army, he graduated from King's College, London in 1948 and took his first post as a lecturer in taxonomy at the University of Birmingham — preparing for it with a spell of training in Kew's Herbarium under B. L. Burtt and the then Keeper, W. B. Turrill.
In 1952 he moved to the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh as a senior scientific officer, and there began the lifelong study of the olive family, Oleaceae, that would define his work. In 1961 he emigrated with his family to the United States to become horticultural taxonomist at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, continuing on the Oleaceae and, after a visit to the south-west Pacific, taking up the flora of that remote region — including Norfolk Island.
He returned to England in 1966 to join the staff at Kew, where he rose steadily: head of the Australasian Section of the Herbarium, then Deputy Keeper in 1971, and from 1976 the joint post of Keeper of the Herbarium and Deputy Director of the Gardens. In botanical citations his name is abbreviated P.S.Green — the standard mark of a life spent classifying the plant world.
Decades of work classifying the olive family — the plant group (olives, ash, jasmine, lilac) on which he was a world authority.
Is this Peter Green the real Peter Green?
Born Peter Shaw Green — a real Peter Green, with a middle name thrown in. Distinguished, but not the owner of peter.green: the real Peter Green.
Sources: Wikipedia (Peter Green disambiguation) · Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew