Charles Sprague Sargent

Charles Sprague Sargent (1841–1927) was an American botanist and the first director of Harvard University's Arnold Arboretum, which he led from its founding in 1872 until his death and built into one of the world's great collections of trees. A Boston-born Civil War veteran who came late to botany, he directed the forestry census of 1880, wrote the fourteen-volume Silva of North America (1891–1902), and condensed it into the Manual of the Trees of North America (1905, second edition 1922), which remained the standard field reference for decades. He sponsored plant-collecting expeditions to East Asia, edited the journal Garden and Forest, and campaigned for the protection of American forests.