This page summarizes recent work to incorporate a donation from USDA, approximately 500 specimens assembled by Jack Kaiser, botanist and border inspector with the USDA. Contributed by George Ferguson
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We learned of specimens collected by Jack M. Kaiser stored in two herbarium cabinets in Nogales, AZ when Dustin C. Sandberg, a Plant Pathologist/Botanist (Identifier) at U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Inspection Station in Nogales (and formerly a graduate student UA) contacted the University of Arizona herbarium. It was an extensive set of specimens serving as a reference collection that had been used by inspectors like Kaiser in the Federal Inspection Building at the U.S./Mexico border in Nogales, to identify plant interceptions coming from outside of the country. The personnel nowadays were not using the collection and felt that it would find better use at a herbarium. They sent a list to the National Botanists in D.C. to see if they wanted them, and otherwise were seeking approval to donate the plant specimens to a herbarium.
We thought it was likely an important set of specimens, with only a handful held in duplicate at UA Herbarium. We searched a subset of the records from USDA to compare to the 394 Kaiser specimens already deposited at the UA herbarium, collections from 1936 to 1990 and found few duplicates. We were aware that Kaiser had coauthored an important checklist:
Toolin, L.J., T.R. Van Devender, and J.M. Kaiser 1979. The Flora of Sycamore Canyon, Pajarito Mountains, Santa Cruz County, Arizona. Vol. 14, No. 3 pp. 66-74
Once, when Larry Toolin was asked about the collector, he said “Jack Kaiser was tough as nails, he grew up on a ranch in the Dos Cabezas Mountains.”
We asked Matt Johnson of the Desert Legume Program at UA (DELEP) about the collector. He said: “I had the privilege of knowing Jack Kaiser through the Arizona Native Plant Society. He was also very helpful in collecting seeds for the Desert Legume Program. Jack was one of the finest individuals I have known and an outstanding field botanist who enjoyed sharing his knowledge of plants with others...I'm not sure without seeing the specimens, but they may have been part of a project that Jack was working on to publish a field guide to the plants of Santa Cruz County. He had not completed that at the time of his death. I don't know what became of his notes and photographic images, but it is possible that some of that material may be among the specimens. There are likely a number of valuable specimens among those documenting new localities and/or plants that are rare in Arizona.”
At last, in October 2021, we arranged a trip to visit USDA offices in Nogales with Matt Johnson, George Ferguson, collections manager at UA herbarium, and Sue Carnahan who is currently writing a flora of Santa Cruz County, AZ. We had to sign vaccination vouchers to enter the government building, spent most of a day sorting through the two cabinets, and returned to box up specimens and haul them in DELEP’s pickup truck to the UA campus.
Lyn Loveless, a UA herbarium associated researcher, has been volunteering in 2023-2024 to help process the Kaiser collection of about 500 old herbarium sheets which all need to be remounted on new archival herbarium paper. The issue of how to remove the scotch taped specimens from the old mounts is cleverly being tackled--it seemed to work well removing the tape with just an Xacto knife, and a bit of patience. In the process, Lyn has diligently been mounting the specimens onto new mounting paper and those will next be databased by our student workers and imaged.
Evaluating the collection, we found specimens collected by Kaiser as a student at UA in 1936, mostly from Sabino Canyon for a botany class, and many other collections from Santa Cruz County, Baja California, and Texas, from the 1940s to 1970s. Recently, in summer 2024, Matt Johnson discovered a copy of Jack Kaiser’s field notes “from 1974 to present” (1993), in the DELEP office in the process of moving the DELEP living seed collection to Boyce Thompson Arboretum.
The following is a brief portrait, excerpts from articles in Arizona Daily Star newspaper and Find a Grave online:
Jack Marion Kaiser was born at the ranch where his parents were caretakers at Marble Camp, near old Fort Bowie, Cochise County, AZ on July 18, 1915. His mother’s parents homesteaded 160 acres 1.5 miles N of Bowie and his mother another 160 acres adjacent in 1912, and they grew the first bale of cotton in the valley. When married in 1914, Jack’s parents moved to Marble Camp where Jack was raised with his younger sister, born in 1917, and his parents lived there until 1936. Jack graduated from Bowie high school in May 1935 and attended University of Arizona, graduating in May 1942. He was in the Air Force from 1942-1945. In 1948 he moved to Nogales to begin his career as Plant Pathologist at USDA until he retired in 1983. Jack was sent to Holland and Belgium in 1961 as inspector for bulbs being shipped to the states. His wife Vida accompanied him. Jack Kaiser died in October 2001 and is buried at the family’s cemetery in Bowie, AZ.