Carroll Wood, 88; botanist nurtured flora and humans

"He was kind of like a guru with plants and had sort of a transcendental knowledge of plant diversity," said Michael Donoghue, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a vice president at Yale University, who studied under Dr. Wood at Harvard. "You could never go to him with a plant question and not come away with a great answer and end up with more intimate knowledge than you ever expected."

Equally well known in the West Rutland Square section of the South End, he coaxed flora to life in his backyard, in neighborhood parks, and a community garden, and he was a familiar figure on the streets, where he walked his cats Max, Birnam Wood (named after a poem), and Katmandu.

Dr. Wood, a professor emeritus at Harvard who even after retiring contributed to a comprehensive study of plant life in Southeastern United States, died of heart failure on March 15 in his South End home. He was 88.

"I think he was truly one of the most knowledgeable people about plant diversity in the world, and he was an inspiration for students at all levels," Donoghue said. "Invariably, the undergraduate students just loved him. He was God to them by the end of the course."

Gentle, friendly, and steeped in the manners and affinity for storytelling that harkened to his Southern boyhood, Dr. Wood guided graduate students and was just as attentive to small links in the chain of life.

On summer days, he set a plant dish filled with water in the backyard of his South End home and slipped in a brick. The contraption, he explained, provided a perch for the honeybees and birds that helped keep the flora he studied healthy and needed to stay robust themselves.

"He put a brick in so the bees could stand and drink water," said Ann Hershfang, who lived upstairs from Dr. Wood for 22 years. "I never knew that when it was dry, they needed to drink, too."

Dr. Wood did. A curator emeritus at the Arnold Arboretum, he could also explain such arcane phenomena as why earthworms tug twigs partway into the surface of a yard, leaving a vertical array that looked like a tiny denuded forest on the lawn.

"I just can't begin to describe how he looked at the world and saw its intricacies," said Hershfang, who lives in the top two floors of the building where Dr. Wood occupied the bottom two.

"He had 40 or 50 plants in his home, some of them very exotic," she said. "One only bloomed once a century, and it bloomed for him."

Carroll E. Wood Jr. grew up in Roanoke, Va., and in nearby Salem, in a home where education was paramount.

"She was a schoolteacher, and he was a doctor of pharmacy," Dr. Wood's brother, John, said of their parents, "so Carroll had a natural background in learning."

Dr. Wood also had a hunger for knowledge about the natural world.

"He was interested in everything scientific," said his brother, who lives in Salem. "He had a pet alligator at 10, I think it was. That was unheard of here in the mountains of Virginia. I can still remember that fool thing. Carroll used to feed it ground meat."

Dr. Wood graduated from Roanoke College in Salem and served in Europe during World War II in the Army's 695th Armored Field Artillery Battalion.

His brother said he taught or conducted research at the University of North Carolina, at the University of Pennsylvania, and in Michigan and California before moving to Harvard, where he had received his doctorate in 1949.

Colleagues and former students say one of Dr. Wood's lasting accomplishments was the Generic Flora of the Southeastern United States project that he initiated in 1955, supervised, and edited. Portions of the study have been published in the Journal of the Arnold Arboretum and Harvard Papers in Biology, said Norton G. Miller, who collaborated on the project and is principal scientist, botany, at the New York State Museum in Albany.

"The project is roughly 85 percent completed," he said. "If you could do an individual page count, it's somewhere in the order of 5,000 pages. The installments, bound together, take up shelf space of 18 inches or more."

Miller said Dr. Wood's focus was highly diversified: He studied the biology of the plants, their life cycles, the way they interacted with animals, and what light their chemistry sheds on evolution.

"He seemed to have zero ego," Donoghue said. "What he really loved was plants. He was happiest when he was handling plants and talking about plants."

While Dr. Wood's research defined the scope of flora in the Southeast, he scattered his knowledge like seeds across the continent through the students he trained at Harvard, and with a side project that found a second life.

Donoghue was among a handful of graduate students who took intricate sketches of plants at the behest of Dr. Woods and used them as a foundation for "Plant Systematics: A Phylogenetic Approach," a textbook they dedicated to their mentor.

"All his career, there was an artist in an office next to him working full time drawing plants, with Carroll standing over him pointing out details he wanted included," Donoghue said. "Before you knew it, he had this huge collection of these very beautiful illustrations. We used them for this textbook, which ends up to be the most popular in the area of plant diversity. These drawings are one of the most remarkable things he accomplished in his career. Now, whole new generations of botanists are studying these drawings and learning from them."

While Dr. Woods lived in Boston for many years, he kept tabs on where he was from, returning for family gatherings.

"I talked to him every Sunday at 2:30," his brother said. "We kind of shored each other up. And he would bring me trees. I've got a 40-foot high redwood in my backyard. He must have brought it back 2 foot tall from California. Anyhow, that's his monument."

A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. on April 26 in the United South End Settlements on Columbus Avenue in Boston.