Donald Pigott – a personal tribute

In autumn 2022, we lost one of the great founders of modern British plant ecology, Professor Christopher Donald Pigott. Donald who was my professor at the University of Lancaster died at the age of 94 and was a member of a distinguished generation of Cambridge botanists that emerged after the Second World War. His roots were deeply embedded in British plant ecology and the history of its emergence and development. As described in a previous obituary in the Arboricultural Journal (Rotherham, 2015), Donald also had a significant influence on the early work of Oliver Rackham, perhaps the most influential landscape historian of his generation. He was described to me by a mutual acquaintance of having the most frighteningly powerful intellect of anyone he had met, and yet he was also both kind and generous when sharing his vast knowledge and insight. At Lancaster, I had the chance to work on the lime trees that were his passion, and then on his brainchild, the fledgling National Vegetation Classification Project. It was Donald’s enthusiasm for trees and their natural history which sparked my own interests to this day. Over the years, it certainly became apparent to me how broad and deep Donald’s own interests in botany and ecology were. He wrote profusely for the Journal of Ecology but also for the proceedings of bodies such as the Botanical Society of the British Isles. Furthermore, when we live in a time of increasing specialisation, his influence was across a broad front to encompass the autecology of individual plant species and the factors influencing their distribution and occurrence, to matters of vegetation census and analysis. Whilst at Sheffield