Robert Ornduff; UC Berkeley Botanist

Robert Ornduff, 68, an expert on native California plants and former head of UC Berkeley’s Botanical Garden, which showcases them. A native of Portland, Ore., Ornduff earned a bachelor’s degree in biology at Reed College, a master’s at the University of Washington and a doctorate at UC Berkeley after studying plants in New Zealand on a Fulbright Scholarship. After teaching briefly at Reed and then at Duke University, he returned to UC Berkeley to teach botany from 1963 through his retirement in 1993. He created a course on California flora and wrote a book on state plants, as well as directing the Botanical Garden. Ornduff made headlines in 1986 when he cultivated the only Bolivian Puya raimondi in the Northern Hemisphere--an amazing plant that blooms only once a century or so--which suddenly shot up a stalk as high as a two-story building to produce its flower. A specialist in how plants evolve, sometimes developing two or three different flowers that discourage self-pollination, he was fascinated with plants of all sizes and shapes, ranging from the giant sequoia to the minuscule yellow flowers called goldfields in California’s San Joaquin Valley. At Berkeley, Ornduff also served as curator of seed plants, director of the university herbarium, and chairman of the department of botany. He was president of the California Botanical Society and was on boards of several plant organizations. Ornduff never overlooked an opportunity to teach the uninitiated about the plants he loved, whether that meant heading tour groups to examine flowers in Jamaica or Morocco or writing letters to newspaper editors. Two years ago he wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, to chide a writer for attributing the notoriety of Alice B. Toklas to her “cannabis-spiked brownies.” Not true, Ornduff said: Toklas added the marijuana to her hashish candy. On Sept. 22 in Berkeley of metastatic melanoma.