Professor Dr. David John Mabberley, (born 1948), is a botanist, educator and writer. Among his varied interests is the taxonomy of tropical plants, especially trees of the families Labiatae, Meliaceae and Rutaceae. He is perhaps best known for his plant dictionary The plant-book. A portable dictionary of the vascular plants. The third edition was published in 2008 as Mabberley's Plant-book, for which he was awarded the Engler Medal in Silver in 2009.
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Born in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, England, Mabberley won a scholarship to Rendcomb College, Cirencester, then an open scholarship to St Catherine's College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1970 and M.A. in 1974. Although he intended to work for a doctorate under the cytologist C.D. Darlington he was inspired to move to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge under the supervision of E.J.H. Corner, leading to a Ph.D. in 1973 and D.Phil.(Oxon) in 1975. Mabberley became a post-doctorate at St John's College, Oxford before being appointed to a fellowship at Wadham College (linked to a university lectureship in the Department of Botany, later Plant Sciences, where he set up the "Mablab" with graduate students and post-doctorates from around the world). He served as Dean of Wadham College for many years and was senior proctor at Oxford for 1988–1989, later becoming Curator of the Oxford University Herbaria. He has also served in various capacities at numerous universities around the world, including University of Paris (France), University of Leiden (the Netherlands), University of Peradeniya (Sri Lanka), and the University of Western Sydney (New South Wales, Australia).
Mabberley moved to Australia late in 1996 and ran his own business there, one contract being as CEO of Greening Australia (NSW). In 2004 he was appointed to the Orin and Althea Soest Chair in Horticultural Science at the University of Washington, Seattle, US.[1] During his tenure there, he oversaw the union of the Washington Park Arboretum, Center for Urban Horticulture, Union Bay Natural Area, Elisabeth C. Miller Library and Otis Douglas Hyde Herbarium as the University of Washington Botanic Gardens, of which he was the founding director. In March 2008 he took up the newly-created position of Keeper of the Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.[2]
Mabberley is known as a world traveller, having performed fieldwork in many countries over several decades: Kenya (1969, 1970–71), Uganda (1970–71), Tanzania (1971–72), Madagascar (1971), Malaysia, Singapore & Indonesia (1974, 1981), Papua New Guinea (1974, 1989), Seychelles (1978), Panamá (1978–79), Portugal (1984–96), New Caledonia (1984), New Zealand (1990), Sri Lanka (1991), Hawai’i (1998), Cape York, Australia (Royal Geographical Society of Queensland expedition, 2002), Malaysia (2003, 2007), Vietnam (2005), China (2006, 2008).
During research for his Ph.D. dissertation, he travelled widely and collected plants throughout eastern Africa and Madagascar (1970-2), making particularly significant pioneering collections in the Ukaguru Mountains (Tanzania), where he discoved at least ten new species of plants (and one new snail species) restricted to that range. These include a giant lobelia (Lobelia sancta (Campanulaceae)), a (hairy) balsam (Impatiens ukagurensis (Balsaminaceae)), and Senecio mabberleyi (Compositae), named after him (he is also commemorated in Homalomena davidiana (Araceae) from New Guinea).
In April 2011, it was announced that from August 2011 Mabberley has been appointed executive director of the New South Wales Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust in Sydney, Australia.[3] In this capacity he will be responsible for the management of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden and Domain, The National Herbarium of New South Wales, The Australian Botanic Garden at Mount Annan near Camden and The Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, Mount Tomah. His Archive, especially that relating to The Plant-book is housed at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, of which he was a Trustee 2008-2011.
Among the awards he has received are the José Cuatrecasas Medal for Excellence in Tropical Botany and the Peter Raven Award (by the American Society of Plant Taxonomists "to a plant systematist who has made successful efforts to popularize botany to non-scientists"), both in 2004.
In 1993 he was elected President of the Society for the History of Natural History. In 2005 he was elected President of the IAPT. In 2008 he was awarded the Linnean Medal of the Linnean Society.