Peter Del Tredici to receive Veitch Memorial Medal

The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is pleased to announce that senior research scientist Peter Del Tredici will be awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal in London this spring. The Royal Horticultural Society presents this prestigious, international award to “persons of any nationality who have made an outstanding contribution to the advancement and improvement of the science and practice of horticulture.”

The award recognizes Del Tredici’s extensive work on numerous aspects of both botany and horticulture over the past forty years. His wide ranging interests include new plant introductions from China, the root systems of woody plants, the natural and cultural history of ginkgo, and urban ecology and vegetation, a subject he explores in his recent book, Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide (Cornell University Press, 2010). He has lectured widely in North America and Europe and has authored more than 130 scientific and popular articles. Del Tredici joins the select company of five other Arboretum staff members who received the Veitch Memorial Medal: Founding Director Charles Sprague Sargent (1896), plant explorer and keeper of the Arboretum Ernest Henry Wilson (1906), propagator William H. Judd (1944), horticulturist Donald Wyman (1968), and curator and horticultural taxonomist Stephen A. Spongberg (1996).