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Lionel Dane Melvin
“Like It Was a Religion”
A Perpetual Student
Sometime around midnight, Lionel Melvin heard on television that a forest fire was burning in South Carolina. For most people, it would have been unfortunate news from somewhere else, but Lionel knew what grew there. A rare population of Pixie-moss and another unusual plant were in the path of the fire, and according to his daughter, Sandra Melvin Gray, Lionel climbed into his ancient pickup truck and set off into the night on a five-hour drive, hoping there might still be something he could do to save them.
It is difficult to imagine a better introduction to Lionel Melvin. Plants were not an interest he pursued when convenient; they were woven into his life. He searched for them, grew them, studied them, pressed them into herbarium specimens, wrote about them, led other people to see them, gave them away, and worried about what would happen when the places where they lived disappeared. His daughter eventually found the simplest way to describe it: “He believed in preserving nature like it was a religion.”
A Botanist Without the Degree
Lionel Dane Melvin was born March 25, 1907, in Bladen County, the oldest of ten children. His formal education began in a one-room schoolhouse his father had built on the family land, but his education in plants began closer to home. Several of his father’s sisters were educated women, including an aunt who had studied pharmacy and botany and helped awaken Lionel’s interest in the natural world.
In 1932, at twenty-five, Lionel entered the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Depression intervened, as did a severe case of red measles, and he was forced to withdraw before completing his degree. What he did not leave behind was UNC—or botany.
At Chapel Hill he had formed a friendship with Dr. Henry Roland Totten of the Botany Department, and that relationship became a lifelong scientific collaboration. Lionel continued bringing plants and questions to the Herbarium. His daughter remembered childhood trips to Chapel Hill in the 1950s when she and her brother played in the arboretum while their father disappeared into Davie Hall and the Herbarium. The university degree had been interrupted, but the education never was.
Lionel’s working life followed no conventional botanist’s path. He worked at Exotic Gardens in Miami, spent time in law enforcement, and during World War II was sent by the Army to MIT to study electronics and radar. After the war he learned television repair and ran a record and appliance shop in Elizabethtown, accumulating along the way a large collection of classical music on 78s. He was a Civitan president, American Legion leader, and Justice of the Peace, and later worked briefly for RCA’s missile program at Cape Canaveral.
Even Cape Canaveral became an opportunity to botanize. Sandra remembered the family returning to North Carolina in a panel truck so packed with Florida plants that there was barely room left for their clothes.
Eventually Lionel found his way into work that brought plants closer to the center of his life. After working for Gilmore Plant & Bulb Company and Sears as a landscaper, he established his own nursery at Pleasant Garden in Guilford County and developed several acres around his home into an extraordinary botanical garden. There was a grove of Yellowwood, Southern-plume, an expanse of Oconee bells, and a lane of Flame Azaleas that his daughter remembered as breathtaking.
Pleasant Garden became much more than a nursery. It became the place where Lionel could bring together what he found in the field, what he learned from professional botanists, and what he discovered by growing and observing plants himself.
From the Woods to Pleasant Garden
The UNC Herbarium now holds approximately 280 specimens collected by Lionel, with others possibly still uncatalogued, and his specimens also found their way to Florida State University, Murray State University, and the New York Botanical Garden. Yet there is something especially revealing about the way he worked. Lionel might encounter an interesting plant in the wild, bring material back to Pleasant Garden, propagate it, study it as it grew, and eventually prepare herbarium specimens from the cultivated plant. In his hands, the boundaries between field botanist, nurseryman, and student nearly disappeared. The wild plant led to observation, observation to cultivation, cultivation to further study, and propagation made it possible to share what he had learned.
One of his most important discoveries began with an oak in a swamp along Buffalo Creek in Guilford County. Lionel initially thought it might be swamp white oak, but after studying specimens with Totten, they concluded that it was something different: a naturally occurring hybrid between overcup oak and swamp chestnut oak. Lionel watched the tree for three seasons, collected specimens, transplanted a naturally occurring seedling to his own grounds, planted seeds from the hybrid, and compared the offspring with the parent species.
In 1956 he formally described the tree as Quercus × totteni, naming it for Henry Roland Totten, the professor who had first recognized that the mysterious oak might be a hybrid and who had remained Lionel’s friend and botanical colleague long after Lionel was forced to leave UNC.
There is something fitting in that story. Lionel never received his degree from Chapel Hill, but decades later a tree he discovered and described carried the name of the teacher who had continued to teach him. A specimen of that hybrid still grows outside the Totten Center at the North Carolina Botanical Garden.
The Society
Lionel was there almost from the beginning. He became one of the early members of the North Carolina Wild Flower Preservation Society, was one of the five men who signed its Articles of Incorporation in 1956, and served as president from 1956 through 1958.
Those dates matter because preservation was not yet a comfortable or widely accepted idea. North Carolina was changing rapidly as roads, development, forestry, drainage, reservoirs, and other alterations of the landscape destroyed plant communities before many people even knew what was there. Lionel understood the danger early. In 1957 he warned that the landscape was changing so quickly that entire species might be lost almost overnight.
He was not speaking theoretically. The Society’s early attempt to protect Pixie-moss habitat in the Sandhills occurred during Lionel’s presidency, and the ability to acquire land to protect rare plants had been one of the principal reasons the young Society incorporated. The effort ultimately failed, but Lionel’s concern about disappearing habitat did not.
More than twenty years later he was still pushing. When the Society discussed rescuing plants threatened by bulldozers and flooding in 1979, Lionel urged members to work more closely with local planning boards. The distinction was important: rescuing plants from destruction mattered, but so did talking to the people making decisions about the land before destruction became inevitable.
Later that year, as North Carolina began implementing its new Plant Protection and Conservation Act, the Society nominated Lionel to the state’s Plant Conservation Scientific Committee, describing him as a well-known botanist and nurseryman. He had been warning about disappearing habitat for more than two decades; now the state was beginning to create some of the machinery needed to do something about it.
The Melvin Influence
Lionel was also ahead of his time in another way: he encouraged people to use native plants in their landscapes. Today that idea is central to the North Carolina Native Plant Society, but in Lionel’s time it was far less common. His nursery at Pleasant Garden became a destination for people looking for unusual native trees, shrubs, and wildflowers.
When the Society devoted its 1991 spring meeting to honoring him, Nell Lewis wrote that Lionel was often called “the most knowledgeable taxonomist in the state.” At one point he had grown every azalea native to North America, and his nursery had become a mecca for people searching for native plants.
But Lewis asked a question that may tell us even more about his influence:
“Who among us has a garden without the ‘Melvin influence’!”
By then, plants Lionel had propagated and shared were growing throughout Greensboro’s public parks and gardens as well as in private landscapes. His influence was not confined to herbarium sheets or botanical publications. It was alive in other people’s yards.
The same Lionel who studied a plant closely enough to determine its identity was willing to propagate it and put it into someone else’s hands. Scientific knowledge and generosity were not separate activities for him; they were part of the same relationship with plants.
The Field Botanist
For all the years he spent building his collection at Pleasant Garden, Lionel never stopped going into the field. He led Society trips into natural areas across North Carolina and used vacations to search remote parts of the state, particularly the eastern landscapes of his boyhood, for rare and endangered plants. Finding one, Nell Lewis remembered, was his “pot of gold.”
His scientific work shows how seriously he took those explorations. In 1954 he presented a paper to the North Carolina Academy of Science documenting rare North Carolina plants he had collected, with identifications checked by Totten and other professional botanists. He published work on genus Nestronia in the Sandalwood family as well as the hybrid oak that became Quercus × totteni, and the hundreds of specimens he deposited in Herbaria remain available to researchers today.
Yet Lionel seems to have worn his considerable knowledge lightly. His daughter called him a “perpetual student all his life,” someone who studied plants every day and gradually became an expert in their identification.
Perhaps that helps explain why he fit so naturally into the early Wild Flower Preservation Society. Professional botanists and enthusiastic amateurs walked the same trails, each bringing a different kind of knowledge. Someone knew the taxonomy, someone knew the mountain, someone knew how to propagate the plant, and someone knew exactly where it grew. Lionel could move easily among all of them because, however much he knew, he apparently never stopped thinking of himself as someone who still had more to learn.
What Remained
Lionel’s wife, Lucy, died in 1995 after fifty-three years of marriage. Lionel died two years later, on November 30, 1997, at the age of ninety. His obituary suggested memorial gifts to two places: his church and the North Carolina Botanical Garden.
His death left Sandra and her brother with a question that appears repeatedly in the history of this Society: what happens to the plants?
Their father’s fourteen acres at Pleasant Garden represented decades of collecting, propagating, observing, and growing. His children donated his rare and unusual plants to the North Carolina Botanical Garden. His herbarium specimens remained in scientific collections, while his personal and professional papers went to UNC’s Southern Historical Collection. The work of one lifetime was dispersed, but much of it remained available to the people who came after him.
Even his gravestone tells the story plainly. Beneath his name are four words: Botanist. Conservationist. Historian. Writer.
I think there is another word we might add: student.
Lionel Melvin never finished the university education he began during the Depression. Instead, he spent the next sixty years creating one for himself—in swamps and savannas, along roadsides and through forests, at the UNC Herbarium, in his nursery at Pleasant Garden, and among the plants he pressed, propagated, grew, studied, and shared.
When the Society gathered in Greensboro to honor him in 1991, Lionel had already been doing that work for some forty years. Yet I doubt he would have considered the work finished. There was always another plant to find, another specimen to examine, another seedling to grow, another question to ask, and another place threatened with destruction.
And sometimes there was a fire burning five hours away in the middle of the night. When that happened, Lionel got in the truck.
Lionel Melvin spent a lifetime studying plants as though there would always be more to learn, and protecting them as though there might not always be more time.