Honorable Forester
How the Arnold Arboretum came to be "bang in the middle of one of the most important fields of research of our time"
by Christopher Reed
Peter Shaw Ashton stepped into his first Asian tropical forest 50 years ago last March. For what he has accomplished in those steamy reaches, he has been awarded the Japan Prize in the category of “Science and Technology of Harmonious Coexistence.”
He had his most formative harmonious encounter in the tropics just at the start of his career, with high-spirited forest-dwellers. “I was a fresh graduate of Cambridge University, and I wanted to be a grad student under my professor, naturalist John Corner,” says Ashton. “He told me, ‘Look, if you want to work in the tropics, you can’t go out for three months on a research grant and do something quick and come back and make some great generalization which will get you through a doctoral dissertation. You’ve got to get yourself a job.’ How was I going to do that? This was the end of the colonial era. I said, ‘The last thing they need is Brits out there at a time of all this change.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ said Corner, ‘every now and then a letter comes from someone who wants a botanist in some remote place in the world.’
“Meantime, I worked at a gas station,” Ashton continues, “where I was soon red for technical incompetence. I then knew that forest botany was my sole ability, and fortunately the opportunity was not long in coming.” After about six months, Corner got a letter from the sultan’s government in Brunei. “‘They’re looking for a botanist to document the timber trees,’ he told me. ‘Would you be interested?’ Unbelievable! Forest botanist to his Highness, the Sultan of Brunei! It sounds like something from the nineteenth century, and indeed in a way it was. So I went off by ship and worked for His Highness Sultan Omar for five years. Those first years are always the best.”
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