Alex Floyd Obituary, Death – Alex Floyd, who is regarded as the father of rainforest botany in New South Wales, passed away at the age of 96. He had reached the age of 96. Extensive knowledge of plants from all around the world, especially Australian native flora, was held by Alex. On the other hand, rainforests were his area of specialization, and he devoted his entire life to gaining additional knowledge about them and passing on what he had already discovered. He was an interesting and engaging teacher who was able to adjust the level of difficulty of the content to match the abilities of the students in the class. He never embarrassed anyone by making them feel silly for not knowing something that he did know. During the middle of the 1970s, when he was working as the chief botanist for the New South Wales Forestry Commission, we made our initial introduction to him.
We were novices to the rainforest at the time, and we were opposing the Forestry’s plans to log Terania Creek Basin at the time. We were performing a transect across the rainforest in the Basin to help provide evidence of the Basin’s high degree of botanical diversity, and he was really helpful and supported us in identifying the trees for the transect. He was quite kind. During his time working for the State Forests of New South Wales, he developed detailed keys to the flora that are native to New South Wales’s rainforests. In the years that followed, in 1989, he compiled all of these keys into a book called Rainforest Trees of Mainland South-eastern Australia. This book quickly earned the reputation of being the bible for those who study and like the rainforest since it provides an astounding amount of detail. When the previous edition of this book was no longer available to purchase, Alex asked that we publish a fresh edition of the book in 2008.
In addition to this, he was the author of the two-volume series titled Australian Rainforests, which was released in the state of New South Wales in the year 1990. These books are currently quite tough to obtain as a direct result of the fact that no one ever parts with their copy of them. All of the species under the genus Floydia, including Alexfloydia repens, Bosistoa floydii, Cryptocarya floydii, and Endiandra floydii, as well as the genus Floydia itself, were named after Alex. Additionally, in his honor, several different types of rainforest trees were given names.
