Education: Absent Guest of Honor

Cornell University was all set to give a birthday party. Banquets and speeches were all arranged; many of the guests had been invited up to Ithaca. But everything had to be postponed: the birthday boy was nowhere around. Liberty Hyde Bailey, when last heard from, was somewhere in the West Indies, wandering through jungles in search of rare plants and palms. And not even his goth birthday would bring him back from such an expedition.

Hundreds at Cornell know “Lib” Bailey, the nation’s most eminent horticulturist, as an erect, white-haired man whom they used to see dragging strange bushes and branches across the campus to his laboratory, where he puttered and purred over them. Sometimes he would grab a visitor by the arm and whisk him off to his garden. There, showing off the blooms and blossoms he had collected from lonely hillsides and jungles all over the world, he would say that his field was the true internationalism: “My pinks speak all languages alike.”

Marauding Bears. Liberty Hyde Bailey, born during the Buchanan administration, was raised in the Michigan wilderness, on a farm his father hacked out of the forest. His family fought off marauding bears, learned to weave their own cloth, make their own soap and candles, tan their own leather, grow or hunt their own food. The elder Bailey was a Puritan, who liked being 52 miles from a postoffice (mail once a week, he thought, was quite enough), and had to approve every book young Lib read, except Pilgrim’s Progress and the Bible. Once Lib brought home The Origin of Species; his father, who had heard fearsome things about the ungodly Darwin, looked it over, said, “I can’t make it out. But I think the man is honest. Read his book.” Young Lib hatched snakes’ eggs in his mother’s oven, began a small collection of plants, made notes on the weather.

At 24, at Michigan Agricultural College, Liberty Hyde Bailey founded the first department of horticulture in any U.S. college. Six years later, he went to Cornell. He set up its first departments of plant pathology, plant physiology, plant breeding and soil technology. As dean of Cornell’s College of Agriculture, he raised the faculty from eleven to 100, increased student enrollment from 100 to 1,400. He wrote over 50 books on plants and plant life, edited 50 more. But between books and classes, he always found time to hitch up his horse & buggy and drive out to tell neighboring farmers of the things he had learned.

“One Has Dominion.” Some time in his teens, Liberty Hyde Bailey made a plan for his life: he would spend 25 years learning, 25 years teaching, and 25 years doing “what I like best.” Accordingly, one day in 1913, he simply failed to show up at the dean’s office. He went to his Hor-torium (he coined the word) instead. Ever since that day, he has been doing “what I like best”—puttering in his greenhouse (“It is an oasis in one’s life. . . . One has dominion”), cultivating his palms (he has the best collection in the world). He has traveled all over the globe—by plane, train, boat, canoe, mule, and on foot—to bring back specimens.

Professor Bailey refuses to take vacations (“They are apt to be vacant,” he says). At 89, he took a three months’ plane trip over the Caribbean and up the Amazon that would have exhausted many a younger man. Asked if he intended to write his autobiography, he answered: “That would be living in the past. And I am looking to the future.”