Miscellaneous news

Dr. Ruurd (“Ru”) Dirk Hoogland, born 24 July 1924 in Leeuwarden (The Netherlands), died still rather unexpectedly on 18 November 1994 in a hospital in the neighbourhood of Paris, just 8 days after an operation. The later years of his life were overshadowed by a serious illness. Ru did not accept this, even not those last weeks when he could hardly chew. Everyday he went to the Laboratoire de Phanérogamie and worked, and in March and April 1994 he even made a collection trip to Tahiti followed by a herbarium trip to Australia. Ru studied at the universities of Groningen and Leiden. He got his Ph.D. in Leiden in 1950 on the thesis “A Revision of the Genus Dillenia”. His promotor was Prof. Dr. H.J. Lam. He started his career as a botanist in the service of the Flora Malesiana Foundation (1949—1952). Being a field man rather than a herbarium taxonomist he went to Australia where he finally became a Principal Research Scientist to CSIRO, Division of Land Research and Regional Survey at Canberra and head of the Herbarium, in 1968 Senior Research Fellow in the Research School of Biological Sciences, also at Canberra. In 1976 he stepped over to the Australian National University. He retired late 1979, but as a matter of fact he went on with his work. In 1981 he moved to Leiden with the intention to work for the Flora Malesiana. Due to a difference of opinion with the Dutch tax office, in 1984 he moved to La Varenne St. Hilaire, not far from Paris, where at the Laboratoire de Phanérogamie he got the opportunity to continue his work.