Botanist’s busy retirement

Press, 11 May 1984, Page 1

Botanist’s busy retirement

By DERRICK ROONEY A familiar face will be officially missing this morning from behind a desk at the Botany Division headquarters at the D.S.I.R. complex at Lincoln. Dr Eric Godley, former director of the division, retired yesterday after a 34year career with the department, during which he was director of two of its divisions, and saw major expansion of their scope and activities. During that time, he managed to squeeze enough research among his administrative duties to become a botanist of international repute. That research work will continue during his “retirement” which promises to be a very busy one. The botany department of the University of Canterbury has given him a room, and once he has transferred to it the truckload of papers, books, notes, slides, and other material accumulated during his career at Lincoln, he will settle down, freed from administrative duties, to get on with his scientific work. First on his retirement agenda, which is busier than most people’s normal workloads, is the completion of a book for the Cambridge University Press. Dr Godley obtained his doctorate at Cambridge after World War 11. This done, he hopes to get on with a book which will take a new look at New Zealand’s native plants. At the same time, he will write up other scientific work, and continue at least two big research projects. Dr Godley joined the Botany Division in 1958, but his interest in the subject extends back to his highschool days in the 1930 s in Auckland, where he was “enthused” by his. botany teacher at Takapuna Gram-

mar School. His studies were interrupted by service in World War 11, but after the war he completed his doctorate at Cambridge University before returning to New Zealand to take up a lecturing post in the botany department at Auckland University. In 1951 he joined the Crop Research Division of the D.S.I.R. as a senior geneticist, and later that year he became acting director of the division, succeeding Dr, later Sir Otto, Frankel. The “acting” capacity became a permanent appointment in 1953, and for the next five years Dr Godley was head of the Crop Research Division. In 1958 he switched to the Botany Division, as director, a post he was to hold for the next 22 years. Dr Godley was thus a director in the D.S.I.R. for 29 years — a record for the department. He stepped down as director qf the Botany Division in 1980, but remained with the division, and retained his post as permanent centre chairman at Lincoln. During his career Dr Godley has seen both divisions multiply in size and scope, and he has also seen a large increase in the size of the Lincoln complex and in the number of branches of the department represented there. He supervised the Botany Division’s move in 1960 from the house in Latimer Square which was its original base to the Lincoln building (soon to be extended). His administrative duties during all this left him less time than he liked for research, but he managed to get some scientific work done. “Fortunately,” he said, “a botanist can do this, whereas a chemist, say, could not.”

“Travel?” he said. “If I wanted to do some botanical studies I would travel, but I can’t see much purpose in travel for its own sake.”

Most of that research, however, was done outside his “regular” work time.

His immediate plans for “retirement” do not include any abating of his scientific work. He is not the sort to follow the frequent pattern of trotting off overseas on a package tour as a retirement jaunt. His present travel plans do not extend much beyond occasional jaunts into the Port Hills — and even these will be working trips, part of his continuing study of the native tree fuchsia and its reproductive cycle. And of course, there will be regular trips back to Lincoln to inspect the progress of another project, the origin of the common kowhai tree.

Dr Godley is trying to synthesise the common kowhai.

Though the kowhai is usually thought of as strictly a New Zealand tree, it ranges not only throughout most parts of New Zealand, but across to Chile, and an “outlier” population has been found on an island in the Atlantic. Related species are found all round the Pacific.

Dr Godley has published material on the oceanic dispersal of Kowhai seeds, and what he is doing now is studying the ways in. which the species mights have originated. (

The South American kowhais, and those from the Chathams, are distinct from those on mainland New Zealand, though recognisably the same species, and even within New Zealand the kowhai varies considerably in flowering time, size, and habit. Some forms have a juvenile stage, which may last as long as 30 years, and some do not.

Dr Godley has a theory that the common kowhai is a very old “hybrid swarm” derived from the two other native kowhai species — the North Island kowhai, confined to part of the North Island east coast, and the prostrate kowhai, found on the east of the South Island down to about North Otago. He believes that the variations in habit and flowering time can be explained by his hybrid theory, which reverses a theory previously advanced for the evolution of the kowhai.

To test this, Dr Godley has hybridised the North Island kowhai and the prostrate kowhai, and he is now raising seedlings from the hybrids, which at eight years of age are flowering and seeding freely at Lincoln. A range of the seedlings which resulted from this second cross will be planted out in the experimental garden at Lincoln, for continuing study. In the meantime, Dr Godley has more urgent tasks to" complete when he moves into his “retirement room” at the university.

i The first is to complete the book for the Cambridge University Press on the origins and biology of the Antarctic flora. Then he would like to write a book about New Zealand plants.

The latter will not be a “popular” book, but nor will it be a dry-as-dust scientific tome. “I won’t be writing a book about how to identify plants,” he said. “That has been done. That’s the first level of botany, and everyone’s staying at that level. That’s all right; that work needs to be done. “I want to look at the biology of the plants. We need to know more about the way plants work, the way they are pollinated, the way they are dispersed, the way they might have evolved, why they are as they are in New Zealand, what their seedlings are like “Time is getting short, but I’d like to have a shot at it.” One writing project which Dr Godley will not continue is his popular “Botanist’s notebook” column in the national gardening magazine. This column will be taken over by the Botany Division, and various members of the division’s staff will contribute to it.