Journal Number 111
February 2009

OBITUARY

Edwin Daniel Hatch FLS 1919-2008
By Ian St George

Dan Hatch died in his 90th year, on 4 November after a short illness. He had been intellectually able and contributing to debate about native orchids until shortly before his death.

Dan Hatch is one of the great contributors to our knowledge of New Zealand orchids.

His father's family moved to the native bush at Laingholm, on the Manukau coast at the foot of the Waitakere's, soon after their arrival in New Zealand in 1922 and Dan Hatch lived there all his life. He grew up with botany, and botanised from age fourteen.

During the 1939-45 War, Dan Hatch was posted to Waiouru. Nearby he found seven orchids not listed in Cheeseman's Manual of the NZ Flora. He sent them to the Botany Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, but at this time Botany Division was not working on orchids.

They suggested he send them to the Rev. H.M.R. Rüpp in Sydney. Meantime he had acquired Nicholls's Gems of the Bush published by the Sun newspaper in Melbourne. So he wrote to Rüpp, care of Nicholls, care of the Sun. To his delight, both men replied. Rüpp had been working with H.B. Matthews until the latter had lost his sight, then with Lucy Cranwell (who had the Matthews collection in the herbarium at Auckland Institute and Museum).

Rüpp had a revision of New Zealand orchids half completed. The two men were poles apart - Hatch was twenty-six, Rüpp over seventy. They collaborated with the first paper, "Relation of the orchid flora of Australia with that of New Zealand", and after that Hatch set out to describe all the New Zealand orchids.

He wrote nineteen orchid papers for the Transactions of the Royal Society of New Zealand from 1945 to 1963 - among over a hundred published botanical papers.

His father, the senior E.D. Hatch (a domestic architect of the Arts & Crafts movement), drew most of the orchids for the T.R.S.N.Z. papers, but Dan Hatch did his own illustrations for his booklet Auckland's orchids, and for his papers on the leafless spider orchid Corybas (Molloybas) cryptanthus, and on the equally strange leafless Yoania (Danhatchia) australis. He was honoured by the generic name Danhatchia (Garay & Christensen), and in the specific epithet of Thelymitra hatchii (Moore). He was made a Fellow of the Linnaean Society.

Dan Hatch was the quintessential amateur botanist: an expert in a narrow field at a time when professionals were simply not interested, or had more pressing work.

In New Zealand orchidology he bridged the gap between Cheeseman and Moore. He made mistakes - but so did Cheeseman and Moore; so, indeed does every scientist who publishes: that is in the nature of science. He was criticised for those mistakes, and was stung by the criticism, retreating to relative isolation in the Laingholm bush. Nonetheless he continued to contribute his vast store of knowledge to friends and orchid colleagues.

He took me under his wing when I first became interested, and continued to provide help and advice until very recently. Eric Scanlen emailed, "Dan was my orchid mentor in early years," and Colin Ogle wrote, "Dan's Auckland's Orchids (1959 edition) was an inspiration to me when there was little else available with illustrations.

I called on him at Laingholm in about 1965 with my 35mm slide collection of orchids and spent several hours with him. He was so interested and encouraging in my tentative steps among our orchids. In all his writings for Auck Bot Soc, NZNOG Journal etc, I enjoyed the way he'd 'stick his neck out' and put his current thinking about orchids in writing, leaving space for other people to agree or otherwise.

NZNOG Journal has extended with this approach for all observers, but I saw Dan as a pioneer, not just in orchid research, but in stimulating 'amateurs' to observe and record what they found. May we all continue to work from his example."

May we indeed.