On Saturday 28 April, RBG’s own Aleksander Tamsalu will turn 121 years young!
You are invited to join RBG Science Department staff at 5 PM, after work, on Monday 30 April (weather permitting) for a short walk over to the grave of Aleksander Tamsalu, in Woodland Cemetery , for a toast to the gentleman in fine Estonian fashion, an RBG late-April tradition. This year we’ve designating Monday 30 April this year as “Tamsalu Day” because many staff are busy with RBG’s Home and Garden Show on Friday the 27th.
Aleksander Tamsalu was essentially RBG’s first field botanist. A colourful and industrious plant ecologist from Estonia , after a turbulent life in Europe he settled in Hamilton in the mid 1950s, and spent about 5 years collecting plants around Cootes Paradise in preparation for using the nature sanctuaries for educational purposes. Tamsalu died in early 1960 and is buried just a few hundred yards from RBG Centre, in Woodland Cemetery . Today the 9,800 plant specimens he collected in the nature sanctuaries are central to our understanding of the plants of the area and are a significant part of RBG’s Herbarium.
Teie terviseks! (Cheers in Estonian… roughly…)
- David
Read Jack Lord’s biography of Tamsalu at: http://archive.rbg.ca/pdf/lord...
