Peter Del Tredici
Peter Del Tredici is an American botanist and author. He is a former senior research scientist at Arnold Arboretum for 35 years and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was appointed curator of the Larz Anderson Bonsai Collection in 1982 and was editor of the journal Arnoldia from 1989 to 1992. Del Tredici, a native Californian, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Zoology from University of California, Berkeley in 1968 and a Master of Arts in Biology from the University of Oregon in 1969, after which he moved to Boston where he established his career and earned his doctorate in Biology from Boston University in 1991. His thesis adviser was Richard Primack and his thesis topic was "The Evolution and Natural History of Ginkgo biloba L.". Research on this project extended over a three-year period and involved travel to eastern China (fall of 1989) and to South Carolina. Del Tredici is an advocate of a "radically practical" approach to urban plant life, holding that what some people see as a collection of undesirable plants should be viewed as a valuable ecosystem unique to the hostile habitat of the city, and he prefers the term "spontaneous"