XVI International Botanical Congess
Agnes Arber has been a most extraordinary botanist, philosopher and spiritual being. She asked penetrating questions and provided answers of far-reaching consequences. Yet she was humble, considering her innovations simply as stepping-stones to further developments. Key concepts in her work are wholeness, part-whole relations, degrees (as in her partial-shoot theory of the leaf), complexity, complementarity, relativity, dialectics, synthesis, etc. She was not dogmatic, but invited differing views. Modern science would be very different if more scientists adopted such a stance. Arber did not take anything for granted. She asked why we use certain theories and concepts such as stem and leaf, and such questioning opened doors for her that still today have remained locked for the majority of morphologists.