Henry Shoemaker Conard

Henry Shoemaker Conard (1874 - 1971) was an American botanist. Conard, a leading authority on bryophytes and water lilies, was also an early advocate of environmental preservation. From 1906 to 1955, he worked at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. In 1954, he became the first to receive the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America.

In 1969, Grinnell acquired a plot of cropland and established the Conard Environmental Research Area, in recognition of the legacy of the longtime professor.

Early years Conard was born September 12, 1874, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Thomas Pennington Conard, director of the West Grove boarding school, and Rebecca Savery Baldwin Conard. His uncle, Alfred Fellenberg Conard, was a horticulturalist, specializing in the development and sale of rose varieties.

He is honoured in the naming in 1976, of Conardia, which is a genus of mosses belonging to the family Amblystegiaceae.

Personal life Conard's first wife, E. Letitia Moon Conard, was a sociologist and politician who died in 1946. He married Louisa Sargent in 1950, with whom he moved to Florida in 1955, where they resided until his death on October 7, 1971, in Haines City, Florida. He had three children, Elizabeth Conard, Rebecca Conard and Alfred F. Conard. and receive an honorary doctorate from Grinnell in 1971.

Selected publications

How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts, 2nd edition with 55 added picture keys, 1956 with Paul L. Redfearn Jr.: How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts (1979), revised 2nd edition, Dubuque, Iowa: W.C. Brown