Liberty Hyde Bailey

Liberty Hyde Bailey (born March 15, 1858, near South Haven, Mich., U.S.—died Dec. 25, 1954, Ithaca, N.Y.) was a botanist whose systematic study of cultivated plants transformed U.S. horticulture from a craft to an applied science and had a direct influence on the development of genetics, plant pathology, and agriculture.

He served as an assistant to the U.S. botanist Asa Gray at Harvard University (1882–84) and as professor of horticulture and landscape gardening at Michigan State Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), East Lansing (1884–88), where he established the first distinctively horticultural laboratory in the United States (1888).

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At Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., where he served as professor of botany and horticulture (1888–1903), Bailey soon established botanical science as the basis of horticultural research, teaching, and practice; he invited physiologists and chemists to investigate problems of plant culture and production, encouraged geneticists to work with cultivated plants, and introduced to botanical education methods of “in-the-field” instruction that largely superseded exclusive emphasis on expository classroom teaching. Also dean of the New York State College of Agriculture, Cornell (1903–13), and an authority on the genera Carex (of the sedge family), Rubus (of the rose family), Brassica (of the mustard family), and tropical American palms, Bailey founded and directed (1935–51) the Bailey Hortorium, now a division of the college.

His prolific literary output (700 scientific papers and 66 books) included several landmark encyclopaedic works: Cyclopedia of American Horticulture (4 vol., 1900–02); Cyclopedia of American Agriculture (4 vol., 1907–09); and The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture (6 vol., 1914). The last work, condensed to three volumes (1925), and his Manual of Cultivated Plants (1923), through revised editions, remain the principal works in the field.