Bondartsev and Berkeley

by John Dawson

Bondarzewia berkeleyi, photo courtesy of John Dawson

The spectacular polypore Bondarzewia berkeleyi (Fries) Bondartsev and Singer is an example of a double eponym, in which both the generic name and the specific epithet are derived from names of people. “Berkeley’s polypore” is frequently encountered, and its large size makes it a memorable find , though perhaps a disappointing one for pot hunters, who may mistake it for the hen-of-the-woods (Grifola frondosa), which also fruits in large clusters at the base of living hardwoods.

Elias Fries, who first described that fungus, named it Polyporus Berkeleyi in honor of his eminent British contemporary Miles Joseph Berkeley (1803–1889), sometimes called “the father of British mycology”. Then in 1940 the great German mycologist Rolf Singer revised the classification of the Polyporaceae and placed Berkeley’s polypore in the new genus Bondarzewia, which, together with the family Bondarzewiaceae, he named in honor of a Russian collaborator of his, Apollinaris Semenovich Bondartsev (1877–1968).

Who were those two men, and what did they contribute to mycology?

Miles Joseph Berkeley

Berkeley was a gentleman scholar, as most nineteenth-century British scientists were, and like many other such scholars, he was a clergyman by profession. Born in Northamptonshire, he was educated at Rugby and Christ’s College, Cambridge, from which he received his B.A. in 1825 and his M.A. in 1828. Ordained as a priest in the Church of England in December of 1827, he became successively curate at St. John’s, Margate, Kent, perpetual curate of Apethorpe and Woodnewton, Northamptonshire, and finally vicar at Sibbertoft.

Berkeley’s interest in natural history began during his years at Rugby and continued throughout his life. He first published on mollusks, but then, under the influence of J.S. Henslow, turned to cryptogamic botany. His wife Cecelia, whom he married in 1830, was a fine botanical illustrator (as was he), and a linguist as well. She helped to translate and illustrate her husband’s botanical publications, the first of which, Gleanings of British Algae, appeared in 1833.

Reverend Berkeley dispensing the mycological bounty at one of the Woolhope club’s forays.

One might suppose that his clerical life gave Berkeley the leisure to pursue his botanical investigations. In fact, however, his appointment provided only a modest stipend and was far from a sinecure. And since he and his wife produced fifteen children, it is no wonder that he found it necessary to run a boys’ boarding school on the side in order to make ends meet!

How Berkeley found time to carry out research and maintain an extensive correspondence with other mycologists at home and abroad is hard to imagine. Yet his output was prodigious: He wrote over 400 papers on fungi, alone or in collaboration with others (especially C.E. Broome). His mycological reputation was established through the meticulously detailed descriptions of fungi that he contributed to one of the volumes of James Edward Smith’s The English Flora (1836), and thereafter he became the authority to whom the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew referred fungal material from all over the world sent there for identification, including that collected by Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle.

In the course of his life Berkeley described over 5000 species of fungi (including many from America sent to him by Moses Ashley Curtis) and built up an herbarium of some 10,000 specimens that he ultimately gave to Kew. But that was not all: The Irish potato famine of 1845 caused him to shift his attention from taxonomy to plant pathology, and it was he who identified the cause of the potato blight (the oomycete now called Phytophthora infestans). Subsequently, between 1854 and 1880, he published a long series of articles on pathogenic fungi in The Gardener’s Chronicle. He was also the first to recognize “the constant presence of basidia [structures that had been discovered earlier by Joseph Henri Léveillé] . . . in a large group of fungi”, thereby helping to establish the fundamental distinction between Basidiomycetes and Ascomycetes. Berkeley was a much beloved figure, and his portrait confirms the description of him as “a man of splendid presence and great refinement”.1

Apollinaris Semenovich Bondartsev

Bondartsev, born ten years before Berkeley’s death, is much less well known. After graduating in 1903 from the Polytechnical Institute in Riga, Latvia, he became a government agronomist. Beginning in 1905 he worked at the Central Phytopathological Station in St. Petersburg, and in 1913 he became Director of the Department of Phytopathology at the Botanical Gardens there (later the USSR Botanical Institute). His work in plant pathology included studies of the powdery mildews Sphaerotheca humuli of hops and Sphaerotheca mors-uvae of gooseberries, as well as the diseases of red clover, hops, and lilacs caused by the pathogens Botrytis anthophila, Septoria humulina, and Ascochyta orientalis (all of which Bondartsev was the first to describe). In 1912 he published a book on Diseases of Cultivated Plants and Methods of Combating Them, which for many years was the only textbook in Russian on phytopathology.

In later years Bondartsev became an expert on polypores and “house fungi”: those that cause decay of man-made structures. Indeed, it is said that at age 81 he would still climb onto roofs to inspect rotted beams. He traveled widely throughout the Soviet Union and in 1953 published Tree fungi of the European USSR and the Caucasus, the definitive monograph on that subject. He maintained a wide network of correspondents and published over 200 articles.

During the siege of Leningrad in World War II Bondartsev remained in the city, where together with his wife Vera Nikolayevna Bondartseva-Monteverde (Here is her wikipedia page. It’s in Russian, but the Chrome browser will translate it for you). He, like Berkeley, studied diseases of potatoes. And in his later years he published a series of articles on polypores with his daughter Margarita Apollinarevna Bondartseva, who is currently on the staff of the Komarov Botanical Institute in St. Petersburg, the leading botanical institution in Russia.2

Two remarkable personalities, from two different centuries and two different cultures, are thus commemorated in the name of a single familiar mushroom.