Scarlett, Neville Harry   (1944 - 2022)

Born 5th October 1944; died 10th August 2022.

Neville Scarlett was a botanist/ecologist who spent much of his life working on the classification, ecology and conservation of the Australian flora, the last 50 years of it at La Trobe University, and the last few years as an honorary research person there.

Neville was brought up in Geelong and then graduated with a BSc from the Botany School, University of Melbourne. He then studied the plant ecology of the Brisbane Ranges for his PhD with Dr David Ashton before withdrawing over the scope of the project.

From then onwards, he was usually employed on grants as a Research Officer for the La Trobe botanist Dr Bob Parsons. For a number of years in the 1970s and 80s, the work involved attempting to locate all surviving populations of every native plant species in Victoria thought to be threatened with extinction Australia-wide.

It quickly became clear that Neville had an extraordinary gift for finding and reading old documents, examining old herbarium specimens and then searching for and re-discovering threatened plants in the field. His rate of output of stunning discoveries was amazing - e.g. Ballantinia antipoda (not seen since the late 19th century), Taraxacum cygnorum (not seen since 1907) - the list goes on and on. This 'rediscovery project' remains the greatest single contribution to Victorian plant conservation that there has been. This led to an ambitious project to re establish populations of some of the rarest species into secure conservation reserves. Neville pioneered propagation and planting techniques, creating some of the earliest threatened species recovery plantings in Australia.

Since then, a lot of Neville's work has been on the taxonomically very difficult plant genera Lepidium (peppercresses) and Taraxacum (dandelions), correcting past errors and providing workable keys to their constituent species.

His Taraxacum revisions are available in the floras of Australia, Victoria and South Australia and his Lepidium revision in the latter.

Many of his excellent plant collections are housed at the National Herbarium of Victoria.

Source: Extracted from: Parsons, R.F. in https://asbs.org.au/newsletter/pdf/22-sep-192.pdf
Portrait Photo: The Wimmera Mail Times, August 27, 1982

Collecting localities for 'Scarlett, N.H.' from AVH (2023)

Data from 2,127 specimens