Julia Morton - Life in Florida and Further Work

Life in Florida and Further Work

After the war ended the Mortons were invited to work at the Subtropical Experimental Station in Homestead, Florida in association with George Ruehle and Dr. Bruce Ledin. Working with Ledin they produced the manuscript for the book 400 Plants of South Florida. Their work came to the attention of the president of the University of Miami, Bowman Foster Ashe, who offered them positions as professors at the Coral Gables campus.

President Ashe approved setting up the Collectanea at the new campus, and with the aid of professor Taylor Alexander, the files were installed in a new, more spacious location, and students employed to select and organize new material. This allowed the Collectanea to be expanded, and visiting scholars had room to work and free access to the material. By 1996 the Collectanea had grown to 500 file drawers and included approximately 15,000 species, but remained a manually collated and indexed resource.

Although their initial work was on edible plants, their area of interest increased to cover poisonous plants as well as useful ones, both edible and ornamental. Additional books were published, and a suggestion that Julia's plant photographs were suitable for charts inspired the creation of two wall posters of "Plants Poisonous to People," one focusing on internally poisonous plants, and the other on skin and respirator irritants.

Kendal Morton died in 1964, according to her book 500 Plants of South Florida 1974, but Julia continued their research and field work. Morton did research into use of plants in the treatment of cancer in the West Indies at the behest of the National Cancer Institute. She also did research into edible plants to aid in survival situations in the Philippines and Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and wrote survival instructions for troops. Morton also conducted surveys of cashew and other edible nut plantations in Venezuela, Colombia and Peru.

Morton became known as an expert on plant poisonings and was often consulted by local authorities. She offered advice and worked to educate the public. Lawrence Kaplan, an emeritus professor of botany at the University of Massachusetts Boston and editor of the journal of the Society of Economic Botany, which Mrs. Morton helped found, said "She was the poison plant center in South Florida". Starting in 1954 when she began consulting for them, the Poison Control Center referred most plant poison calls to her. Although she received an honorary doctorate from Florida State University in 1973, she never formally attended college.

Morton continued to write, lecture, and answer inquiries at the Collectanea even after retiring. She retired from teaching in 1993, after being a University of Miami professor for about 4 decades. She was critically injured in an automobile accident on August 28, 1996 and died on September 10, 1996.