Chip Muller, our speaker for the evening of November 20th, is well known to most VRS members. Since he has not been with us for a couple years now, however, new members should know that he is an excellent speaker and most congenial friend, always welcome at the VRS.

Chip is on the faculty of the University of Washington Medical School, specializing in reproductive (human) technology. But that is not of much interest to us! Of more interest is the fact that he has had ‘a long relationship with mountains, and with mountain people and plants. He has hiked, climbed or trekked in the major ranges in the U.S., the Alps, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the Himalayas’, most of this, at least in the last two places, having to do with exploration for rhododendrons.

As he tells us himself, ‘Chip grew up in Pennsylvania, where his father, George, was active in the American Rhododendron Society (ARS) and president of the Philadelphia Chapter. George traveled in India, China and Sikkim in the early 1940s [a difficult time to travel to these places I imagine], and returned to these areas with his son and daughter up to his 83rd year. Chip's love of rhododendrons may have been "inherited" from his father, but his own enthusiasm for collecting species dates to his first plant exploration trip in the Himalaya in 1986.’ Chip is an avid, and excellent, photographer, and has photographed rhododendrons, and other interesting things, in western China, Tibet, Sikkim, and Nepal, and has shared his photographs in slide presentations and ARS Journal articles over many years.

He is currently President of the Seattle Rhododendron Society (a counterpart to the VRS) and was a co-Chair of the ARS Annual Convention in Seattle in 1999. He is a holder of the ARS Bronze Medal. He has also served for some years on the Board of Directors of the Rhododendron Species Foundation. He ‘and his [very lovely and charming] wife Angela Ginorio and daughter Emmy tend their wooded city garden of rhododendrons and companion plants, and help maintain his late father’s three-acre Himalayan garden on Whidbey Island. Besides species rhododendrons, his favorite plants are Meconopsis, Primula, Arisaema, and almost any Himalayan perennial, shrub or tree’.

Although he has gone on expeditions in recent years with Steve Hootman and others, Chip has, as he has indicated, done much of his traveling with his father and his sister, who are much admired by everyone acquainted with them. It is on this family team that he will be speaking to the VRS in a lecture entitled, ‘People, Plants and Peaks: Sixty Years of Family History in the Nepal-Sikkim-Tibet Himalaya’.

Chip Muller