Tom Tutin

Thomas Gaskell Tutin, FRS (21 April 1908 – 7 October 1987) was Professor of Botany at the University of Leicester and co-author of Flora of the British Isles and Flora Europaea.^[1]

Earlier life

Tutin was born on 21 April 1908 in

In 1944 Tutin was appointed lecturer in charge of the department of botany at University College, Leicester, and in 1947 he became the first professor of botany there. The College became the University of Leicester in 1957. Apart from his teaching and administrative duties, Tutin's interest now turned to taxonomy. Sir Arthur Tansley had drawn his attention to the need for a new British flora, and Tutin began a collaboration with Arthur Roy Clapham and E. F. Warburg, to write the 1591-page Flora of the British Isles, published in 1952, which quickly came to be regarded as the standard work on the subject.^[2][3] A briefer Excursion Flora from the same authors was equally successful. Emboldened by this success, Tutin's ambitions turned to wider geographical areas. At the eighth International Botanical Congress, in Paris in 1954, the need for a flora of Europe was identified, and a group of British botanists formed an editorial committee, with Tutin as chairman, which spent the next twenty and more years in collating and publishing the massive Flora Europaea.

He was President of the

In 1942 he married a palaeoecologist, Winifred Pennington (1915–2007). They had a son and three daughters. Tutin died in Leicester on 7 October 1987.^[2]

References

Bibliography