Netherlands before the war. He then continued to expand it with the assistance of his wife and son, systematically collecting botanical terms from botanical texts. It is said that only he could have written this work, which explains not just the derivation of plant names but also the philological principles involved in forming those names. The work is considered responsible for the continued survival of Latin as the lingua franca of botany. In addition to this seminal text, he frequently delighted in the illumination that the classics could add to understanding plants and plant lore, such as his Five Brethren of the Rose (1965). His best known popular work is his Dictionary of Plant Names, which found its way into the libraries of most horticulturalists. One of the focuses of his work at the Natural History Museum was the flora of the Caribbean, where he carried out field work. Stearn continued to return to the Cambridge Botanic Garden, cared for his own garden and worked with the RHS to become an authority on horticulture as well as botany. William Stearn collaborated with his wife, Eldwyth Ruth Stearn, on a number of his most important works, including Botanical Latin and Dictionary of Plant Names and translating German botanical history into English. Just before his death he completed a revision of his original Epimedium monograph. Botanical history William Stearn wrote extensively on the history of botany and horticulture, from Ancient Greece to his own times. He collected together J. E. Raven's 1976 J. H. Gray Lectures, editing and annotating them as Plants and Plant Lore in Ancient Greece (1990). In 1993, he and Eldwyth Ruth Stearn translated and expanded Baumann's Die griechische Pflanzenwelt in Mythos, Kunst und Literatur (1986) as The Greek Plant World in Myth, Art, and Literature. Stearn compiled a major work on the life of John Lindley and produced an edited version of the classic book on herbals by Agnes Arber, one of the influences of his Cambridge years, and whose obituary he would later write for The Times. He also wrote a number of histories of the organisations he worked with as well as a number of introductions and commentaries on classic botanical texts such as John Ray's Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum (1691), together with historical introductions to reference books, including Desmond's Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists (1994). In his Botanical Gardens and Botanical Literature in the