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Ernest Rouleau


Ernest Rouleau (1916-1991) was second only to Merritt Lyndon Fernald, in his importance to Newfoundland botany.

He became the curator of the Herbier [ie. herbarium] de l'Institut botanique [later the Herbier Marie-Victorin], in Montréal, in 1938, at the age of 22! Two years later he also became a professor of botany at the Université de Montréal. He held both of these posts until 1982.

In a true sense, Rouleau followed directly in the footprints of Fernald; spending the summers of 1938, 1945 and 1946 as a curatorial assistant in the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University, under the direct supervision of the "Great Man", and even accepting the enormous job of proofreading Fernald's 1696 page "Gray's Manual of Botany (8th Edition)" (Fernald 1950).

Indeed, it was Fernald who urged Rouleau to continue the work that he, himself, had begun in Newfoundland in 1910.

Between 1948 and 1969, Rouleau spent 22 summers botanizing in Newfoundland, amassing approximately 11 200 plant collections - a prodigious effort!

Many of his collections were made in our "limestone" regions.

While Rouleau published many papers and reports during the course of his internationally-recognized career, the culmination of his Newfoundland work must be his "Atlas", published the year after his death [cover photo].

For a more extensive bibliography and biography, see pp. 20-28 and 37-43 in Rouleau and Lamoureux (1992).







[Page last updated: November 11, 2021]





















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