Alice Faber Tryson was a trailblazer in botany, and despite being honoured by her peers, was not given the fame she deserved. Which is often the case with people of colour, indingenous people, and women in the field of science. Born as Alice Elizaebth Faber on August 2, 1920, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Wisconsin is where Alice Tryson where she would receive her bachelor’s degree, and complete her master’s thesis in 1945 on the “taxonomic utility of spore characters in the spikemoss genus Selaginella”. Selaginella is a genus of vascular plants that often grows in tropical areas, and rarely in the arctic-alpines. Although they are not true ferns, they are considered “fern allies”. This is important as it laid the groundwork for the overall areas of interests Alice Tryson focused on, both of which related to ferns.
In 1952, Alice Tryson received her PHD at Washington University, with a dissertation “on the diversity and taxonomy of the New World species of Pellaea, a genus of xerically adapted ferns in the Pteridaceae.” If her choice of topics for her thesis and dissertation were evident enough that Alice Tryson’s name was synonymous with ferns, she was also a member of the American Fern Society. This link between Alice Tryson’s name and ferns didn’t end there. In 2014, a genus of ferns was named Tryonia in honour of all her work with the ferns. Her work and name will live on forever with these plants.
Alice Faber Tryson broke barriers in 1968 when she was the first ever female member of the New England Botanical Club. Just ten years after, she would be elected as the president of the club. After working at Harvard with her husband for many years, she retired, and in 2012 she donated her collection to the Alice and Rolla Tryon Pteridophyte Library at the University of Vermont. With how much she impacted the field she studied in with her work, and with how much she was respected by her peers, Alice Faber Tryson is a person who should be celebrated by the general public. Although that may not be the case currently, her name will be honoured and live on in the library and fern genus named after her, and by us. As students of plant ecology, it should be our duty to bring forward these names to the masses and bring light to all that they have done, if no one else will.
References:
Gastony, G. J., Barrington, D.S., Conant, D.S. (2009). “Obituary: Alice Faber Tryon (1920–2009)”. American Fern Journal, 99 (4), 231–235. doi:10.1640/0002-8444-99.4.231
Pfister, D.H. (2013). Rolla Minton Jr. Harvard Gazette.
Cochran, A.T., Prado, J, Schuettpelz, E. (2014). Tryonia, a new taenitidoid fern genus segregated from Jamesonia and Eriosorus (Pteridaceae). PhytoKeys, 35, 23–43. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.35.6886
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 