Donald C. Peattie

Donald Culross Peattie (June 21, 1898 – November 16, 1964) was a U.S. botanist, naturalist and author. He was described by Joseph Wood Krutch as "perhaps the most widely read of all contemporary American nature writers" during his heyday.

Biography

Peattie was born in Chicago to the journalist Robert Peattie and the novelist Elia Peattie. He studied French poetry for two years at the University of Chicago and then transferred to, and graduated (1922) from Harvard University where he studied with the noted botanist Merritt Lyndon Fernald. After field work in the Southern and Mid-West United States, he worked as a botanist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1922–1924).

His brother, Roderick Peattie (1891-1955), was a geographer and a noted author in his own right.

Donald was nature columnist for the Washington Star from 1924 to 1935.

His nature writings are distinguished by a poetic and philosophical cast of mind and are scientifically scrupulous. His best known works are the two books (out of a planned trilogy) on North American trees, A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (1950) and A Natural History of Western Trees (1953), with woodcut illustrations by Paul Landacre.

Peattie also produced children's and travel books, altogether totaling almost forty volumes.

Books

• Trees You Want to Know (1934)
• An Almanac for Moderns (1935)
• Singing in the wilderness: a salute to John James Audubon (1935)
• Green laurels: the lives and achievements of the great naturalists (1936)
• The Story of the New Lands (1937)
• This is Living, A View of Nature with Photographs (1938)
• A Prairie Grove (1938), a narrative of the history and family home of naturalist Robert Kennicott
• Flowering Earth (1939)
• The Road of a Naturalist (1941)
• The Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge; the story of the southern Appalachians, edited by Roderick Peattie ... The contributors: Edward S. Drake, Ralph Erskine, Alberta Pierson Hannum, Donald Culross Peattie [and others] ... New York, The Vanguard Press [1943]. Edited by Roderick Peattie, Donald's brother, this book contains long sections of some of Donald's best writing, include a history of naturalist/explorers in the southern mountains, and some beautiful descriptions of the southern spruce-fir forest.
• Forward the Nation (Armed Services edition) (1944)
• American Heartwood (1949)
• A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950; 2nd ed 1966; Reprint as trade paperback with intro by Robert Finch, 1991. (Portions were previously published in The Atlantic Monthly, Natural History and Scientific American in 1948-49.)
• A Natural History of Western Trees, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1953; Reprint as trade paperback with intro by Robert Finch, 1991.
• A Natural History of North American Trees (2007), an abridged one-volume selection from the previous two volumes (112 of the original 257 essays; 135 of the original 365 illustrations). This edition won the National Outdoor Book Award (Outdoor Classics, 2007).
• The Rainbow Book of Nature (1957)
• Best in Children's Books (6) by Donald Culross Peattie, Phyllis Krasilovsky, Rudyard Kipling, and Rachel Field (1958)

Legacy

• Peattie's papers, correspondence, and manuscripts, and those of Louise Redfield, are in the archives of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Davidson Library, Department of Special Collections.

References

External links

• Donald C. Peattie at Find a Grave