Roland M. Jefferson

Roland Maurice Jefferson (September 3, 1923 – November 27, 2020) was an American botanist who was the first African-American botanist to be employed by the United States National Arboretum, where he worked from 1956 to 1987. According to The Washington Post, he became an "international authority" on flowering cherry trees, coauthoring a 1977 book on how Washington, D.C., obtained its famous cherry trees.

Early life and education Born as an only child in Washington, D.C. to parents Edward Wilson Jefferson and Bernice Cornelia Bond, Jefferson attended Dunbar High School, served stateside as a US Army airman during World War II, and went to college on the GI Bill, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in botany from Howard University in 1950. However, he struggled to find work that utilized his professional skills, at one point entertaining dental school. He got a job at the US National Arboretum making informational plant labels in 1956. He quickly devised a new method for labeling plants, replacing the Arboretum's fast-deteriorating plastic labels with metal ones. He was promoted to botanist (the first African American to achieve this status at the US National Arboretum) in 1957. entitled The Japanese Flowering Cherry Trees of Washington D.C.: A Living Symbol of Friendship (1977).

First Lady Helen Taft had planted ninety of these cherry trees in 1909, and Tokyo mayor Yukio Ozaki gifted another 1,800 Japanese cherry trees to the United States in 1912, as a gesture of friendship from Japan. Seeing the original cherry trees in decline, Jefferson took cuttings and propagated over one hundred trees between 1976 and 1979, playing a key role in the preservation of DC's famous cherries.

In the early 1980s, Jefferson and research assistant Kay Kazue Wain reorganized flowering cherries into botanical groupings called Yama-zakura (wild "mountain cherries") and Sato-zakura (cultivated "village cherries"), adopting romanized Japanese nomenclature instead of Latin names. Their work was published in 1984.

In the 1990s, Jefferson donated his personal papers to the National Arboretum's library and archives. She died in Honolulu on September 11, 2014, at the age of 81.

Publications