Charles Piper

Who was Charles Piper?

Charles Vancouver Piper was an American botanist and agriculturalist. Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, he spent his youth in Seattle, Washington Territory and graduated from the University of Washington Territory in 1885. He taught botany and zoology in 1892 at the Washington Agricultural College in Pullman. He earned a Masters degree in botany in 1900 from Harvard University.

Piper compiled the first authoritative guides to flora in the northwestern United States. With his collaborator, R. Kent Beattie, he surveyed the Palouse area of southeastern Washington, and expanded the study to the entire state in 1906. That year, The Smithsonian Institution published his catalog Flora of the State of Washington. He also published Flora of Southeast Washington and Adjacent Idaho and Flora of the Northwest Coast. These works established him as an authority on the plants of the northwestern U.S.

In 1903, Piper began a career at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., which lasted until his death there. He worked on the domestication and introduction of grasses. On a trip to Africa, he found Sudan grass and introduced it to North America as a forage plant. Piper noted that much less study had been made of forage crops as compared to cotton, cereals, and other crops. He attributed this to the lack of economic incentive in studying forage plants.