IN MEMORIAM
It is with a sad heart that we share that former Center for Plant Conservation Trustee, Erica Leisenring, passed away. Erica served as a CPC Board of Trustee from 2014 through 2018. She was a former St. Louis City public defender, who had also practiced family law. Besides her board service to CPC, she served on a variety of non-profit boards in St. Louis and volunteered as a tutor at an urban public school. Erica was a member of The Garden Club of St. Louis and loved to spend time in her small, city garden. She was a wonderful, thoughtful colleague and a great champion for plant conservation. Erica is survived by her husband, Robert Sears, and their two sons, Ned and Henry, their wives, and by her mother, Julia Leisenring, also a former CPC Trustee. We will all miss her.
We share sad news from our colleagues in Hawaii that Betsy Gagne passed away in March. Betsy’s breadth and depth of knowledge and work in the protection of Hawaii’s natural resources inspired many to devote their life’s work to conservation. Betsy graduated from the University of Hawaii and taught in Papua, New Guinea. Returning to Hawaii, she participated in the Hana Rain Forest Project where she reported having seen three small birds with black faces, colored like a chickadee. This was the first ever sighting of the po‘ouli. Betsy was the first biologist to see Miconia calvescens in Hana in 1991. Knowing the devastation that the plant inflicted on Tahiti, Betsy and her husband Steve Montgomery mounted a 15-year campaign to get the “green cancer” on Hawaii’s Noxious Weed list, prohibiting its importation. In the 1990s, Betsy served on Natural Area Reserves Commission, later becoming their Executive Secretary.