R. W. Lent
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Name
Roy W. Lent
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Dates
21 Nov 19311932 - Oct 2012
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Specialities
Spermatophytes
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Roles
Collector
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Movement Details
Costa Rica
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Notes
Collector Notes: Costa Rica (1969), 1972): NY
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From http://www.ticotimes.net/2012/10/16/inventor-and-botanist-roy-w-lent-dies-at-80 (consulted 18 Nov 2014)
Inventor and botanist Roy W. Lent dies at 80
STEVE ERCOLANI OCTOBER 16, 2012
EMAIL
Roy W. Lent, intrepid botanist and graduate of the University of Oklahoma, died of cancer last week at his home in the San José suburb of Escazú. He was 80.
Lent, who for 10 years studied botany in unexplored areas along the Caribbean slope of Talamanca, donated his body to San José’s UCI Medical, one of the finest Latin American medical schools.
While breeding plants in the early 1960s, Lent accumulated 24 collections of plants and discovered five new species.
Lent was particularly keen on orchids, and one species now bears his name: the flowering Cestrum lentii. Always the inventor-explorer, while building a website for his brainchild association Save Costa Rica’s Orchids seven years ago, he spoke enthusiastically about his latest contraption.
“The problem is to get seed of wild native species back up into the high jungle canopy,” he said. “So I invented a cute little top balloon filled with a hydrogen system that is going to get a trial!”
Lent’s fertile imagination led him to work in many different fields, including biofuel production and wine making (TT, June 5, 2005, TT, May 24, 2007). Before he died, he remained busy promoting an energy venture researching the Jatropha curcas plant as a way to produce vegetable oil as fuel for diesels at his own Atlantis Energy (TT, Nov. 4, 2011). His research aimed to develop cultivations with other oil-producing plants to advance cyclic, integrated systems using the poisonous Jatropha – not only to produce fuel, but also food for animals and humans.
Throughout his frenetic periods of invention, Lent had also managed to build a sustainable and assisted living community and cooperative called Gaia Sana (TT, June 5, 2005).
The legacy Lent has left behind will be carried on by one of three co-founders. He is survived by two sons Billy (also called Roy) and Albert and his Honduran wife, Margarita, a former international phone operator.
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Extracted from http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/research/Edge/jul13/jul13not.shtml (consulted 21 Nov 2014)
ROY W. LENT (21 November 1931–12 October 2012). We learned belatedly that Roy Lent had passed away from cancer in Escazú, Costa Rica, last Fall, at the age of 80. Roy’s name is well-known to all who have worked on Costa Rican floristics due to his many important plant collections. Roy arrived in the Costa Rica during the 1960s as a student from the University of Oklahoma, and never went back. He collected plants in Costa Rica mainly during the period 1964–1977, and also gathered a handful of specimens from Honduras (where he met his wife), Mexico, and Panama. Although he was not a “numbers” collector, apparently never attaining the 5000 milestone, Roy explored many rich areas, then practically unknown, making critical collections that yielded numerous new records and taxa. He was, for example, one of the first botanists to visit what is now Parque Nacional Tapantí. We can account for at least nine spp., in a disparate assortment of genera (Anthurium, Blakea, Castilleja, Cestrum, Elleanthus, Monstera, Ocotea, Philodendron, and Phoradendron), with epithets honoring Roy Lent, and surely there will be others to come. As far as we can recall, we last saw Roy on 26 October, 2004, during the presentation ceremony for the first three Manual volumes at the Museo Nacional [see The Cutting Edge 12(1): 1, Jan. 2005]. Our hearts go out to his wife, Margarita, and their two sons (one living in Costa Rica and the other in Houston).
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