Fairchild, David Grandison (1869-1954), an American botanist and explorer, brought over 20,000 species of plants to the United States. He helped found the Section of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and directed that section from 1906 to 1928. In 1938, he established the Fairchild Tropical Garden near Miami, Florida. It became one of the world’s most extensive botanical gardens. Fairchild wrote such books as Garden Islands of the Great East (1945) and The World Grows Round My Door (1947).
Fairchild was born on April 7, 1869, in Lansing, Michigan. He studied at Kansas State and Iowa State colleges and at Rutgers University. He began collecting plants during a voyage around the world from 1897 to 1905. He died on Aug. 6, 1954.
