Lawrence Alexander Sidney Johnson, (26 June 1925 – 1 August 1997) known as Lawrie Johnson, was an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n taxonomic

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is the science of identifying and naming species, and arranging them into a classification. The field of taxonomy, sometimes referred to as "biological taxonomy", revolves around the description and use of taxonomic units, known as taxa...

 botanist. He worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney

Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, Australia, are the most central of the three major botanical gardens open to the public in Sydney....

, for the whole of his professional career, as a botanist (1948-1972), Director (1972-1985) and Honorary Research Associate (1986-1997).

Alone or in collaboration with colleagues, he distinguished and described four new families

Family (biology)

In biological classification, family is* a taxonomic rank. Other well-known ranks are life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, genus, and species, with family fitting between order and genus. As for the other well-known ranks, there is the option of an immediately lower rank, indicated by the...

 of vascular plant

Vascular plant

Vascular plants are those plants that have lignified tissues for conducting water, minerals, and photosynthetic products through the plant. Vascular plants include the clubmosses, Equisetum, ferns, gymnosperms and angiosperms...

s, 33 new genera

Genus

In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...

, and new 286 species

Species

In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...

 (including posthumous publications), and reclassified another 395 species.

Of the families he described, Rhynchocalycaceae

Rhynchocalyx

Rhynchocalyx lawsonioides is a small flowering tree, the sole species of family Rhynchocalycaceae. It is endemic to the KwaZulu-Cape coastal forest mosaic ecoregion of the Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa....

 (with B. G. Briggs, 1985) is accepted by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group

Angiosperm Phylogeny Group

The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, or APG, refers to an informal international group of systematic botanists who came together to try to establish a consensus on the taxonomy of flowering plants that would reflect new knowledge about plant relationships discovered through phylogenetic studies., three...

 (APG); Hopkinsiaceae and Lyginiaceae, which he and B. G. Briggs proposed in 2000 be carved out of Anarthriaceae

Anarthriaceae

Anarthriaceae is the botanical name for a family of flowering plants. Such a family has rarely been recognized by taxonomists.The APG II system, of 2003 , does recognize this family, and assigns it to the order Poales in the clade commelinids, in the monocots...

, have not been accepted by the APG.

Lawrie Johnson died of cancer in 1997.

External links

• Biographical memoir by associate Barbara G. Briggs
• Photo of L.A.S. Johnson http://www.flickr.com/photos/17674930@N07/3992450414/