of the National Tropical Botanical Garden. In 1938, he was honored by having the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables named after him. He was also the namesake of David Fairchild Elementary in South Miami. University of Miami Fairchild was a member of the board of regents of the University of Miami from 1929 to 1933. For three of those years he was chairman of the board. In 1933, he was awarded the Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. His son, Alexander Graham Bell Fairchild, lived and worked as a research entomologist for 33 years at the Gorgas Memorial Laboratory in Panama. His daughter, Nancy Bell, married another entomologist, Marston Bates, author of many books on natural history. She herself wrote a book, East of the Andes and West of Nowhere, about living in rural Colombia during the 1940s. Fairchild is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of lizard, Anolis fairchildi. Plant introductions Southwestern (Pima) cotton David Fairchild played an important role in introducing cotton to the southwestern United States. Circa 1900, the United States led the world in cotton production, with its large production of “upland” cotton in the southeastern part of the country, and its high quality sea island along the Atlantic coast. At the time, the southwestern United States did not produce commercial quantities of cotton. Egypt then led the world with a class of cotton higher quality than "upland" and more economical than "sea island". H. J. Webber and others in the United States Department of Agriculture believed Egyptian cultivars would thrive, under irrigation, in the deserts of the southwestern United States. On behalf of the USDA, David Fairchild visited Egypt in 1902 and brought back a few cultivars. A USDA team led by Thomas H. Kearney selected among these cultivars, and after a decade of refinement, released the first cultivar successful in the southwestern United States. This particularly high quality cotton eventually came to be known as Pima. Works Fairchild wrote four books that describe his extensive world travels and his work introducing new plant species to the United States. Beside sharing his legendary tropical botanical expertise, Fairchild provided graphic accounts of native cultures he was able to see before their modernization. He was an accomplished photographer and illustrated these books himself. The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1938) Garden