Philip A. Munz

Who is Philip A. Munz?

Philip A. Munz, botanist, taxonomist and educator, of the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, was Professor of Botany at Pomona College, serving as Dean for three years.

Munz compiled the voluminous A California Flora with David D. Keck published by the University of California Press in 1959 and a supplement in 1968. Munz published A California Flora without any research support and with a relatively small subvention for publication to the University of California Press.

James Hickman, editor of the 1993 revisions of the The Jepson Manual, writing in The Blazing Star, Sept./Oct., 1993 states "Munz used a phylogenetic system which so far as I know has never been explained in print except for a statement on the inside of the front portion of the dust jacket, 'It abandons the conventional family order and attempts to follow that suggested by recent contributions from morphology and phylogeny.' Floras are not a place to introduce new phylogenetic systems. In Munz' 1974 A Flora of Southern California he saw the light and arranged the families alphabetically within major groups."

Munz also authored a series of popular plant guides, published by the UC Press, entitled the California Wildflower Books, for general readers interested in botany but untrained in taxonomy.