The Plant Press

From The Plant Press, Vol. 28, No. 2, July 2025.

W. Carl Taylor (1946-2025)

William Carl Taylor, of Arlington, Virginia and The Villages, Florida, passed away on March 3, 2025, in Ocala, Florida.

Taylor was born in St. Louis, Missouri to Ruth and William A. Taylor on April 4, 1946. He attended Bayless School in Afton, Missouri. He got his B.A. from the University of Missouri in Columbia and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Botany from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

From 1970-1971 he served in the US Army. He was a sergeant in the infantry in Vietnam, where he won a purple heart and a bronze star.

He married his wife, Jerry, on June 12, 1971, in Warrenton, Missouri.

His career began at the Milwaukee Public Museum of Natural History where he became the head of the Botany Department. After 30 years, he briefly moved to Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and then became a Program Officer at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia.

He was well known for his studies on the taxonomy of a group of spore-bearing plants in the genus Isoetes. He mentored many graduate students and was honored with a Colloquium in 2018 at the Botanical Society of America annual meeting. He taught courses in botany at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, Old Dominion University, Eagle Hill Research Institute in Steuben, Maine, and the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica. He was a Research Associate at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. He retired in 2011.

He loved plants! With his wife, he enjoyed growing plants in his greenhouse and planting all native plants in his yards in Wisconsin, Virginia, and The Villages.

He is survived by his wife.