Horticulturist honoured by DART management

Thursday, April 8, 2004

In a special ceremony held this week in the Cabinet Room of the Glass House, respected horticulturist Dr George Proctor was presented with a donation of $40,000 from DART Management and the Ministry of Tourism, Environment, Development and Commerce.

The donation is intended to allow Dr Proctor to undertake some of the work necessary to revise and update the text of Flora of the Cayman Islands, which was first published as a reference manual by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1984.

The original publication, which documents numerous rare and endemic plant species found in the Cayman Islands, is now deemed obsolete as a reference because of the discovery of approximately 109 new records in 51 families, including six new families and several new species.

With the donation, Dr Proctor is hoping to rewrite much of the book to include new concepts in botany, new records, and update the text to reflect new plant family categorisations and resulting changes to the Key.
Dr Proctor is the pre-eminent authority on Cayman Islands’ plants. The 84-year-old is a Harvard graduate, Professor Emeritus at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, consultant Botanist at the Institute of Jamaica, Natural History Division and works frequently at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

He was in need of $20,000 to pay a special assistant to transpose his new work to a digital version for printing and another $20,000 to allow for retirement once the book is completed.

According to DART Management: “There is no-one else on the planet that has the information to produce the new edition of Flora of the Cayman Islands and Dr Proctor’s extensive knowledge should not be lost, nor should he be allowed to languish in obscurity without completing his life’s work.”

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