Botany
As a young man, Bailey read Asa Gray’s Field, Forest, and Garden Botany, and avidly studied taxonomic keys and descriptions used in plant classification. His first botanical paper (unsigned) was a review of a “Catalogue of Michigan Plants,” published in the Michigan Agricultural College’s publication, College Speculum, in 1881. It was in the botanical study of cultivated plants that Bailey made his most significant and lasting contributions. He argued that such plants were especially worthy of study and record. Genetically complex and inadequately recorded as well as economically important, they presented many problems of classification and nomenclature. Throughout his life, Bailey sought to bring botanical science within the grasp of the ordinary person.
After his retirement, Bailey continued his taxonomic work. From 1923 to 1949 he published over a hundred scientific papers, mostly extended studies concerning the revision of various genera. He became a specialist in the systematics of the palms and the blackberries. He also published revisions of Vitis (grapes), Brassica (cabbages and kales), Cucurbita (pumpkins and squashes), Hosta (plantain-lilies), and horticultural monographs of lesser botanical import on Dianthus, Delphinium, Campanula, and the gourds.
Vasculum
When he was a boy, Bailey made the acquaintance of Lucy Millington, a botanist from New York, who helped him identify a grass-like plant in the sedge family (Carex). Mrs. Millington told him stories of botanical excursions to the Adirondacks and took him on collecting trips in South Haven. She later gave him her vasculum (plant collecting case), in which she had carried the first specimen of the spruce mistletoe (Arceuthobium pusillum), which she had discovered. Later Bailey recalled:
She told me the names of my plants and pronounced the strange words as if they were her common speech.... She left me a precious memento, which I still cherish. It is a small botany-case, painted bright red when she gave it to me and which I yet keep in that color.... This collecting-case I carried through my college years and long thereafter.
Rubus
Bailey placed his taxonomic studies of Rubus at the top of his accomplishments in systematic botany. Before 1890, he published three papers on native dewberries, followed in 1895 by an extensive treatment of cultivated blackberries and their indigenous counterparts. In 1932, he published his first major monograph and, from 1941 to 1945, his major work, “The Genus Rubus in North America,” describing 487 species. The Rubus herbarium at the Hortorium contains more than 33,000 collections, most of them created by Bailey.
Palms
Bailey’s interest in palms began with a visit to Jamaica in 1910. From 1930 until 1949, he published forty-five papers on the family. Confusion in palm taxonomy had resulted from the inadequacy of preserved specimens on which botanists had based classification since the majority of palms often grow well over 100 feet tall, have huge, leathery leaves, and giant clusters of flowers and fruits. Bailey developed new collecting techniques for palms during his collecting trips to Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, and the West Indies. He believed in the importance of good photographs, and despite many difficulties, he got his specimens and his pictures. The resulting collections at the Bailey Hortorium continue to be among the finest in the world.
Gray’s Field, Forest, and Garden Botany
Asa Gray. Field, Forest, and Garden Botany: A Simple Introduction to the Common Plants of the United States East of the 100th Meridian, Both Wild and Cultivated. Rev. and extended by L. H. Bailey. New York: American Book Co., ca. 1895.
In 1894, Bailey was chosen to revise Asa Gray’s Field, Forest, and Garden Botany. In doing so he added authorities for Latin names and more than doubled the number of garden and agricultural plants included.
Carex
Botanical Gazette, Vol. 9, No. 8, August 1884, “Notes on Carex. I”; Vol. 9, No. 8, September 1884, “Notes on Carex. II. ”
Beginning with his childhood interest, Bailey became an acknowledged authority on the American sedges (genus Carex). His first paper, “Carex,” appeared in 1884 in the Botanical Gazette, following by nineteen more articles before 1900. On his 1888 trip to Europe, he visited every important herbarium west of Russia and studied and photographed specimens of Carextypes. He used a cumbersome plate camera, with plates shipped from Rochester, N.Y., probably the first application of photography for this purpose.