Herb Wagner: Revered Professor Left Lasting Imprint

Important to Michigan's environmental history is the career and contributions of the late Warren H. "Herb" Wagner, Jr., a world-renowned botanist and biology professor at the University of Michigan for nearly 50 years. Dr. Wagner, who passed away in January 2000, is a treasured memory to many former students now devoting their professional energies to the ecological sciences and preservation of vanishing ecosystems.

Dr. Wagner was also a conservation advocate who spoke out on some of the major issues of his time. When citizens rallied to the defense of the Bridgman Dunes in southwest Michigan in the late 1970s, they called on the professor to conduct an ecological inventory of the site, which the Martin Marietta Company wanted to mine for industrial sand.

Wagner called the site part of "the richest dune community of any dune complex in the world." Wagner told the Detroit Free Press, "I don't think we have the right to destroy areas so rare as this one, especially for a short-term gain. That sand will only last the miners a few years, then they will have to go somewhere else."

More than anything, perhaps, it was Dr. Wagner's love of his chosen field and of the teaching profession that impressed people.

A Love of the Natural World

Born in 1920 and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, the young Herbert Wagner found the Smithsonian a source of delight as he developed an interest in the natural sciences. In his studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he became an "enthusiastic field companion" of E.T. Wherry, an expert on Eastern ferns. After service in World War II, he completed his doctorate at the University of California-Berkeley, where he met his wife-to-be and fellow botanist, Florence Signaigo. In 1951, he joined the U-M faculty in Ann Arbor.

Dr. Wagner's accomplishments at the university were legion. He chaired or co-chaired more than 45 doctoral committees and served on more than 235. He served from 1966 to 1971 as director of the University's Matthaei Botanical Garden. An early member of the Michigan Natural Areas Council, he conducted some of the field studies that led to nominations of areas to be protected by the then-Department of Conservation.

Dr. Wagner was well known internationally for inventing the "Wagner tree," which became central to research in the study of evolutionary trees, or how species evolve and are related to one another. He and his wife Florence identified several new species of ferns in Michigan, the Great Lakes region, and North America.

The professor was also known for his avid research interest in grapeferns, often extremely small and notoriously difficult to find and work with. Also known as moonworts, grapeferns comprise a group of 50 to 60 species that grow across North America, often occurring in great diversity in high latitudes and high elevations, mostly in meadows and woods. Wagner loved to seek grapeferns and found much overlooked diversity in this obscure group, and eventually named numerous new varieties.

Dr. Wagner's forays into the dunes, woods, and meadows to "chase" grapeferns" were jokingly known as "botrychulating." The bent-over position one typically had to assume to search for these tiny plants in the field gave rise to the malady known as "botrychium back," a Wagner term he joked about in lectures.

The interests of this scientist reached beyond ferns and plants in general. His natural history "hobbies" included butterflies and mineralogy.

His approach to botany was also unusual, says Mike Penskar, a botanist with the Michigan Natural Features Inventory. "Herb was such a monumental scientist because he worked with species in their natural environment. To Herb, plants and butterflies were organisms best studied in the field, not just from herbarium sheets and pinned insect collections."

An Unforgettable Personality

He was "brilliant, feisty, fiery, passionate, and truly talented and unique," says Penskar. "Herb was a natural historian in the truest and most classical sense of the phrase."

Sand dune advocate Don Wilson of Bridgman remembers Wagner's visit to his house when the professor was conducting his inventory of the dunes there. "I was looking for papers when I heard someone playing the piano." It turned out, Wilson said, that Wagner was a bit of a renaissance man; he played the piano while stationed in Florida as a flight instructor during military service.

Wagner also impressed Wilson with his teaching abilities. "His practice on that visit was to point out various trees and plants and names. During off-duty hours in the local pubs he'd say, what's that? You learned in a hurry to pay attention. I learned a lot in a relatively short time."

His students remember him vividly. Glen Chown, now the Executive Director of the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy, says: "His enthusiasm and intensity were very contagious to all students who knew him. I remember during the orchid section of his [systematic botany] course he would dress up with stamens attached to his forehead to emphasize the unusual reproductive adaptations of this plant family. Class was always an adventure and he had an incredible sense of humor."

In a tribute to Dr. Wagner, former student and now Iowa State University botany professor Donald R. Farrar wrote, "Warren 'Herb' Wagner changed things. Through his professional research, he changed the direction of his science…Through years of teaching at the University of Michigan and mentoring of graduate and undergraduate students, professional, amateurs, and the public, he turned people onto the excitement of science."