NATURAL MAN

Now in these last days the sun shines brighter, the birds sing more gaily and everything seems more laughing, now that my prison walls are crumbling away under the steady hammer strokes of father time,” Frank Meyer wrote shortly before leaving a job at a nursery in Washington, DC, to scout plants in the wild, a task the young man loved even more than tending specimens in a greenhouse. Born Frans Nicholas Meijer in Holland in 1875, Meyer spent more than a decade roaming China and Central Asia on behalf of David Fairchild, himself a legendary plant explorer risen to chief of the U.S. Agriculture Department.