User:Toyonbro/Lee Wayne Lenz

Lee Wayne Lenz (1915 – October 27, 2019) was an American botanist and mycologist who was director of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden from 1960 until his retirement in 1983. Lenz was also a professor of botany at Claremont Graduate University. His botanical contributions were mainly in the field of monocots, primarily Iris, the Asparagaceae, and the Bromeliaceae. He created a number of horticultural hybrids and cultivars of irises, and served on the board of directors of the American Iris Society. His early publications also concerned fungi, Tertiary and Carboniferous-era paleobotany, and paleomycology. Lenz was also an advocate for the use of native plants in California gardens and was a collector of sculpture and contemporary art.

Life
Lee Wayne Lenz was born in 1915 in Bozeman, Montana. He graduated from Bozeman High School in the 1930s and went on to the city's university, Montana State College, choosing botany as his major. He then attended the University of Minnesota and Louisiana State University in pursuit of higher education, earning his Bachelor of Science in 1937.

Lenz later entered the Henry Shaw School of Botany at the Missouri Botanical Garden, affiliated with the Washington University in St. Louis, to pursue his doctoral studies. This was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Lenz joined the United States Navy in 1942 and served under Admiral William Halsey Jr. as an educational instructor in Nouméa, New Caledonia. As the war progressed, Admiral Francis X. McInerney appointed First Lieutenant Lenz as his assistant to help manage and inspect naval training and education programs on the West Coast of the United States, which familiarized Lenz with California. Lenz was discharged in 1946.

Lenz resumed his doctoral studies at Washington University under Dr. Edgar Anderson, focusing his research on the histology, breeding, and genetics of maize. During his studies, he joined a project team funded by the Rockefeller Foundation studying the landraces of maize across Mexico, which spurred a lifelong interest in the flora of the country. Lenz completed his PhD in 1948. After obtaining his PhD, Lenz was appointed assistant botanist at the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden (RSABG) in Santa Ana Canyon, California. The garden moved north to Claremont in 1952. Lenz worked his way up within the RSABG until 1960, when he succeeded Philip A. Munz as director. Lenz's duties as director were assisted by his administrative experiences in the Navy, and he continuously published papers, articles, and books over his tenure, while managing many other aspects of the institution as well. Lenz retired in 1983 but continued to visit the garden regularly as director emeritus. Lenz had a lifelong interest in sculpture and contemporary art that deepened after his retirement, and arranged for the sculptures and paintings he collected to be displayed at the RSABG. Lenz was healthy enough to continue his regular visitations to the garden even after he turned 100. Lenz passed away on October 27, 2019, at the age of 104.

Career
Many of the early publications of Lenz focused on paleobotany and mycology. in 1941, Lenz described a new species Tilletia from Lousiana. In 1942, Lenz described Carboniferous-era fossil ferns in the genus Stipitopteris. Throughout the 1940s, Lenz collaborated with Henry Nathaniel Andrews on paleobotanical studies of Tertiary and Carboniferous flora, and on the paleomycology of fossil mycorrhizae.

Lenz's PhD thesis submitted to the Henry Shaw School of Botany of Washington University focused on the comparative histology, genetics, and breeding of maize (Zea mays), and was completed with funding from the Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Co. He was advised during his graduate studies by Edgar Anderson, who also had a background studying maize. A portion of his thesis, the Comparative histology of the female inflorescence of Zea mays L., was published in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1948. During his doctoral studies in the late 1940s, Lenz, along with Anderson, were attached to a research group, the Mexican Agriculture Program, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and dedicated to studying maize in Mexico. The program, led by Jacob George Harrar, was heralded as an important step in the Green Revolution.

In the 1950s, Lenz studied the anatomy, taxonomy, breeding, cytology, and horticulture of North American Iris species. Lenz conducted a systematic study of Iris in his 1958 publication A Revision of the Pacific Coast Irises, and later studied their hybridization and speciation in his 1959 publication, Hybridization and Speciation in the Pacific Coast Irises. In 1954, he described a cultivated interspecific hybrid of Fremontodendron mexicanum and Fremontodendron californicum, and a cultivated hybrid of Ceanothus americanus and Ceanothus cyaneus. He additionally published the book Native plants for California Gardens in 1956, a book focused on gardening with plants native to California.

Lenz was promoted to director of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in 1960, but continued his botanical work. He expanded on the cytology of monocots, continuing his work on the irises, and also explored the Allieae and the orchids, along with their hybridization. By the 1970s, his work expanded to even more monocots, including more systematic studies of the irises and Triteleia. He described several new species of monocots from North America, encompassing two new Dandya, and a new Triteleia and Dichelostemma. Lenz also covered the cytology of several genera in the Liliaceae, including Muilla, Milla, and Bloomeria.