Liberty Hyde Bailey

When Bailey agreed to come to Cornell, he was also granted a trip to Europe to study various departments of horticulture and the important European herbaria. In Germany he discovered that the camera could be used to make accurate records of plant specimens. Although he did some traveling during his years at Cornell, after his retirement he devoted himself to extensive and frequently arduous travel for scientific purposes, for observation and for collecting plants. Among other trips, in 1917 he went on an expedition to China; in 1921 to Trinidad and Venezuela; in 1929 to Cuba; in 1931 to Hispaniola; in 1938 to Guadeloupe and Martinique; in 1940 to Mexico; in 1947 to Brazil.

He collected Brassica material along the coasts of Great Britain and western Europe, from eastern and central China, and from the marketplaces of four continents. Similarly, he collected Cucurbita materials from the backlands of Mexico, from isolated tribal plots of the Seminole Indians in Florida, and from Panama and northern South America. He collected palms in Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, and many islands in the West Indies. In fact, he spent his 90th birthday in the West Indies on a palm collecting expedition.

In 1917 Dr. and Mrs. Bailey and their younger daughter Ethel sailed from San Francisco to visit their older daughter Sara in Shanghai. Bailey traveled through China, sometimes with his family and sometimes alone, from Shanghai to Nanking and Hangchow, Ch’i-hsien, up the Yangtse River to Kiukiang and Kuling, Hankow and Wuchang, and then, via rail to Kioshan, collecting specimens of trees, ornamental plants and garden crops. His entire collection totaled about 730 species in 482 genera. From his studies of these specimens, he later revised the classification of many common food plants, especially the members of Brassica, which includes the kales, mustards, cabbages, Brussels sprouts, turnips, and cauliflowers.

Bailey began his journeys to see wild palms in the volcanic islands of the Caribbean, in the jungles of Panama and South America, in Mexico, and in the southern United States. He visited the Caribbean area on eighteen different occasions from 1910 to 1949, and collected palms and other plants on at least thirty-one islands in the two Antilles chains. He collected in the almost inaccessible Oriente province of Cuba, and over most of Trinidad, Tobago, and Little Tobago. Mrs. Bailey and Ethel accompanied him on several trips during the 1920s, and Ethel continued to accompany him until 1938. On most of his later expeditions, he traveled alone. On his last three trips, in 1946, 1948, and 1949, he was able to schedule airplane flights. He spent his ninetieth birthday collecting palms in Grenada, and his ninety-first en route by sloop from St. Eustatius to St. Kitts.