Welcome

In the hills above the Artibonite, 1982. Photograph by a colleague.

Welcome. I am a retired professor of botany. For thirty-five years I taught plant taxonomy and economic botany to undergraduates who, for the most part, would rather have been elsewhere. In the early 1980s I spent three field seasons in Haiti, studying the plants used in Haitian folk medicine and in the preparations associated with the Vodou religion.

This page is where I keep what remains of that work: my field notes, a selection of photographs and herbarium specimens, a list of my publications, and an account of the case of Clairvius Narcisse, which brought my research a great deal more attention than I ever wanted.

I built these pages myself, with some help from my granddaughter. Please be patient with the photographs. They were scanned from 35 mm slides that are now more than twenty years old.

These pages are also available in French and in Portuguese, thanks to two of my former students. Any errors are mine.

D.R.A.