Joseph Clemens - Botanical Collecting

Botanical Collecting

Joseph began to learn botany at his wife's prodding. She learned the study of flora after she gave up her dreams of being a musician. In 1915, while living in a mission camp and continuing to preach to the natives, Joseph and Mary made their first study together at Mount Kinabalu in North Borneo. In a period of six weeks they found and documented 101 new species of plants. In July 1931 he and his wife moved onward, leaving Luzon and the Philippines for Borneo again. There they began a plant collecting expedition which was later commissioned by the British Museum.

Still having a soft spot for Dickinson College, he and Mary created the Joseph and Mary Strong Clemens Scholarship Fund for students of Dickinson who are studying the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church. In that same year, 1934, he and Mary had an article about them published in the Manila Bulletin, celebrating the advances that they have made in the botanical sciences. Meanwhile, he maintained contacts with his limestone alma mater half a world away, writing a letter to the College in 1935 that became an article in the Dickinson Alumnus. It describes one of his trips to the Islands, and his impressions of the natives he found there.