Donald C. Peattie

Donald Culross Peattie was an American botanist, naturalist and author. He was described by Joseph Wood Krutch as perhaps the most widely read of all contemporary American nature writers during his heyday. His brother, Roderick Peattie , was a geographer and a noted author in his own right. Some have said that Peatties views on race may be considered regressive, but that expressions of these views are mercifully brief and hardly malicious.

Peattie was born in Chicago to the journalist Robert Peattie and the novelist Elia W. Peattie. He studied French poetry for two years at the University of Chicago and then transferred to and graduated from Harvard University, where he studied with the noted botanist Merritt Lyndon Fernald. After field work in the Southern and MidWest United States, he worked as a botanist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture . He was then nature columnist for the Washington Star from 1924 to 1935. At some point in the late 1920s Peattie and his wife, with their fouryearold daughter and baby son, moved to Paris to launch the frail bark of our careers. At two days in Paris the daughter died of a malady unsuspected and always fatal. In a search for sunlight they resettled in Vence in the south. Another son was born there.

Source: Wikipedia