2022/10/01 by Susanne S. Renner, D. J. N. Hind · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Plant Diversity and Evolution #Plant and Fungal Species Descriptions #Plant Ecology and Taxonomy Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/tax.12816
openalex publication_date 2022/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
Charles Jeffrey (Fig. 1), taxonomist extraordinaire and plant nomenclature guru, passed away, after brief illness, in a hospital in Saint Petersburg on 29 March 2022. Charles was 88 years old and mentally fit, continuing to discuss nomenclatural and other scientific topics in letters exchanged with friends and former colleagues well into early 2022, although often with notes of nostalgia: “I have decided to say farewell to botanical work, which – begun in Gabon in 1957 and continued successively at Kew, the Komarov, and here at home – has given me 65 years of stimulus and pleasure – lucky me!” Charles was born in London on 10 April 1934 and acquired a love of vocal and especially operatic music from his mother (Lilian May) and a keen interest in gardening and natural history from his father (Charles Sydney). He spent his childhood in Walthamstow, near Epping Forest at the border between Greater London and Essex, and also went to grammar school in Walthamstow. He obtained four General Certificates of Secondary Education, three of them at advanced level, but botany at ordinary level, and after 18 months of National Service, he entered the University of Cambridge (Sidney Sussex College). Possibly to avoid more direct military training, Charles spent his National Service studying Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguistics, which had been founded after the war to provide language training, principally Russian, to the British Armed Services. On graduating from Cambridge in 1957, Charles accepted a post as a taxonomist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he remained until his retirement at age 60 in 1994. After the two-week International Compositae Conference held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in July 1994, Jeffrey moved to St. Petersburg, and worked in association with the Komarov Botanical Institute until the Covid-19 epidemic prevented him from using the Institute's herbarium and library. Charles's main interests were the systematics of Cucurbitaceae and Compositae, the systematics of higher taxa, plant nomenclature (Jeffrey, 1968, 1977, 1982a), and the conservation of nature and natural resources. It was Jeffrey (1967) who first proposed the taxon Streptophyta for the Charales and embryophytes, and his interest in the construction of higher group classifications, applying cladistic principles, led him to propose a five-kingdom classification (Jeffrey, 1982b), with two kingdoms in the superkingdom prokaryotes and three other kingdoms (plants, fungi and animals) in the superkingdom eukaryotes; within plants, there were four subkingdoms: protists, chromophytes, chlorophytes, and rhodophytes. At the lower taxonomic level, he newly described, or transferred, 860 names, most of them in the Compositae and Cucurbitaceae (International Plant Names Index, https://www.ipni.org/), and molecular data now available for the Cucurbitaceae support an impressive proportion of his higher taxa and related species transfers. Charles also collected plants, most importantly in Gabon (1957), the Seychelles (1962/63), Kenya (1963), Mongolia (1970), and Venezuela (1977), with a main set deposited at Kew. Working closely with Armen Takhtajan (1910–2009), Charles played a key role in helping to secure funds for the Komarov Botanical Institute to renovate its herbarium and library building (Jeffrey, 1994). From 1994 to 2006, he was a member of the editorial board of the main Russian botanical journal, Botanicheskii Zhurnal, and, fittingly, his last publication was an obituary of Armen Takhtajan (Jeffrey, 2012). Charles Jeffrey was married twice and is survived by three children and six grandchildren. With his second wife, Dr. Margarita Baranova, a plant anatomist at the Komarov, Charles shared a scientific interest in the Rhizophoraceae and the early angiosperms, and a deep appreciation of opera. Both also loved cats. In one of the more romantic tales in modern botany, Charles and Margarita first met in 1966, when he was researching the Eurasian cucurbit genus Bryonia in the Komarov herbarium and the Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry; they married in 2001, 35 years later to the day. In Charles Jeffrey, systematic botany loses a generous, broad-minded intellectual, and warm-hearted colleague who will be dearly missed.