Dedication to dean william taylor

Volume 68 of Madroño is dedicated to Dr. Dean William Taylor, a friend, colleague, educator, and mentor (Fig. 1). Dean was a fixture in the California botanical community for the past 50 years and widely known for work relating to California’s rare plants, floristics, and taxonomy. Dean was born and raised in Stockton, California. He became enamored with plants and natural history at an early age during family trips to Yosemite National Park. As a teenager, he worked summers at Silver Lake Camp near Carson Pass, Sugar Pine Point State Park at Lake Tahoe, and Sequoia National Park. It was during this time that Dean became captivated by the flora of the Sierra Nevada— the unique and rare species in the Carson Pass region held a special early fascination. Dean’s formal education began locally, at San Joaquin Delta College; he later earned a B.S. in Biology from California State University, Fresno in 1970. Then it was off to the University of California, Davis, where he studied botany under Jack Major, Grady Webster, Michael Barbour, and Ledyard Stebbins. As a graduate student Dean lived and breathed botany–Robert Holland, a fellow student at the time, remarked upon visiting his apartment that every horizontal surface was piled with at least a foot of pressed specimens and noted the calligraphed Latin binomial labels on storage containers for his kitchen staples such as Avena sativa L. (oatmeal) and Triticum aestivum L. (flour). Ultimately, Dean earned his Ph.D. in Botany (1976) studying the ecology of the timberline vegetation at Carson Pass, Alpine County, CA. From 1969 to 2020, Dean pursued, identified, and collected thousands of significant taxa deposited in California herbaria. He often jokingly referred to himself as a ‘‘modern day hay baler’’ of plants, and although sometimes his techniques were ‘‘somewhat unconventional’’ they were highly productive and valuable. He collected over 22,000 specimens, 13,800 of which are represented in the Consortium of California Herbaria (Fig. 2). While the majority of his collections were made in California, his specimens span much of North America, from Alaska to Baja California, Mexico. Dean’s collections led him and coauthors to describe five new taxa (Fig. 3) and 41 new combinations. Two new taxa were collected by Dean and described by others, both of which share the taylorii specific epithet (Fig. 3). Dean authored or co-authored numerous publications: peer reviewed journal articles, technical reports, notes, and a technical flora of the Yosemite region. He was wellregarded for his many theories involving historical biogeography, intriguing plant distributions, and relict plant populations. While some of his creative floristic analyses and hypotheses are included in his published works, many more live on in projects in which he assisted or influenced,