05/06/2026
We mourn the passing of Dr. Peter H. Raven (1936-2026), a preeminent botanist and tireless leader in advancing scientific understanding and conservation of biodiversity worldwide. Peter was a 3rd generation undergraduate at UC Berkeley in the 1950s and gave back generously to the Berkeley herbaria throughout his long and phenomenally productive career, first as a Professor at Stanford and for four decades as Director of the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Peter’s ties to UC Berkeley ran deep, as he recounted in his 2021 autobiography (Driven by Nature, Missouri Bot. Gard. Press). He became fascinated by California’s native flora as a child, when he learned to identify plants using Jepson’s 1925 A Manual of the Flowering Plants of California and was mentored by J.T. Howell (California Academy of Sciences), who had been a graduate student of Jepson’s. As a teenager, he became interested in plant evolution in part through fieldtrips with G. Ledyard Stebbins, who had recently moved to Davis from Berkeley, where he had been an assistant professor. As an undergrad at Berkeley, Peter came under the influence of botanists Lincoln Constance and Herbert Mason, who encouraged and advanced his thinking about botany, before he went to UCLA to conduct Ph.D. work on the evening primrose family – a lifelong passion -- with Harlan Lewis.
Peter remained involved in California botany and UC Berkeley after leaving for Missouri Botanical Garden in 1971. He and Dan Axelrod, another Berkeley alumnus, published the monumental and still widely cited “Origin and relationships of the California flora” (Univ. Calif. Publ. Bot.) in 1978. As a leader of the Flora of North America project, Peter had a major role in California floristics and was a great friend of the UC Berkeley Herbaria and Jepson Flora Project. Peter’s passing is felt deeply here and we will always be grateful for his friendship, collaboration, and immensely positive impact on UC Berkeley, botany, and the world.
