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Cowlin: Do you have a favourite naturalist alive or dead
who you most admire?
Masefield: The trouble is there, that I have changed horses in
mid stream so often. If you have asked me this when I was a
youngster, I would have said Kingdom Ward. I do not know
whether you know him. He was a plant hunter, late nineteenth
Century, who wrote 'Plant Hunting in the Andes' and 'Plant
Hunting in China' in the tradition of the good old explorer,
I liked his books and read them all so I admired him. Of course
his job was to bring back plants for the various herbaria and
botanic gardens and so on. But at least he opened up new
countries and he brought back new plants. He wrote extremely well.
Then a little bit later if you had asked me I would have said
Charles Darwin. I still am a great admirer of Charles Darwin,
As soon as I was able to understand the theory of natural
selection, I fell for it and I read his 'Beagle' many times.
And as a man he had the courage of his own convictions, as the
Church was dead against him; yet he was careful not to give
evidence unless he had sifted it properly; he was thoroughly
scientific and when he found there was a publisher of virtually
the same paper there was no animosity in him. So I think he
was a first rate scientist and naturalist,
Julian Huxley I have admired, at times, but I think probably
the man who has influenced me most in later years has been Sir
Arthur Tansley, the father of ecology. He was interested in
plants because it is not rarities that make up the community
and so he was interested in the common plants, how they grew
with others. He wasn't a taxonomist - I found a kindred
spirit there', I am more interested in a plant as a member
of a community than I am as a dried herbarium specimen. In
fact I have no herbarium. His books, the 'British Islands and
their Vegetation', the standard work, have pride of place on
my shelves and I still refer to them many times, I don't think
they will be beaten for a long time. So at the present I would
say my choice is for Sir Arthur Tansley,
Cowlin: Finally have you anything to say on any other subject.
Masefield; Well I don't know, I think I would like to say