Richard Schultes retired from Harvard in 1985. A caring head of a distinguished family and a renowned plant scientist, Richard seemed oblivious of his many accomplishments throughout his life. He often described himself as “just a jungle botanist.” His death in 2001 was a serious loss to the field of economic botany and the cause of preservation of tropical forests. Richard contributed to the science of botany far more than the immense collection of plants, many of them new to science, that he managed to bring back to this country after a dozen years of exploration in the Amazon. He was the first to point out the close dependency on and intimate knowledge of plants by the native inhabitants of the tropical forests. For his own survival in the Amazon he depended on his ability to communicate with tribes that had never seen a white man before and he was able to obtain valuable knowledge of their use of native plants for food, medicine, and religious rites.