Ernest Entwistle Cheesman, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetErnest Entwistle Cheesman
British botanist
Date of Birth: 
About Ernest Entwistle Cheesman
- Ernest Entwistle Cheesman (21 September 1898 Wood Green - 9 January 1983 Weybridge), was an English botanist noted for his work on the family Musaceae.
- He was the son of Charles Cheesman and Grace Lizzie Davies.
- About August 1936 he married Ellen Elizabeth B.
- Weston (1892-1966).Cheesman collected in Trinidad and Tobago in 1925-1937, working as professor of botany at the Trinidad Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture and publishing Flora of Trinidad and Tobago with R.
- O.
- Williams in 1929.
- He became interested in the cultivation of cocoa while in Trinidad and wrote a number of papers on the subject - Cheesman E.E.
- 1935.
- The vegetative propagation of cocoa.
- Tropical Agriculture 12(9): 240-246. Cheesman E.E.
- 1936.
- The vegetative propagation of cocoa.
- VII.- Root systems of cuttings.
- Page 7, plates 3 & 4 in Fifth Annual Report on Cocoa Research 1935, Trinidad. Cheesman E.E.
- 1941.
- General notes on field experiments CRB1 to CRB6.
- Pages 4–11 in Tenth Annual Report on Cocoa Research 1940.
- Trinidad.Returning to England he worked on the taxonomy of Musaceae at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew during the 1940s.
- As a result of his studies he revived the genus Ensete in 1947 (Kew Bull.
- 1947, 97), first published in 1862 by Paul Fedorowitsch Horaninow (1796-1865), but then not accepted.
- Cheesman made it clear that there are no wild Musa native to Africa, only Ensete, and that Ensete is monocarpic, has large seeds and 9 haploid chromosomes.Cheesman noted in 1948 of bananas "Some botanists have regarded the seedless forms as ranking with the fertile species and have bestowed Latin binomials upon them.
- Others have preferred to regard them as varieties of one mythical "species" (usually called "Musa sapientum") which is supposed to exist somewhere in the wild and fertile condition … Such mistakes...
- are not peculiar to the genus "Musa", but they are unusually conspicuous in this group".
- Giving a seed-bearing wild species the status of subspecies to a seedless cultivar is a good example of the stultifying effect formal nomenclature has had on crop taxonomy.
- Musa cheesmanii N.W.Simmonds is a tribute to his work on the Musaceae.
- Simmonds was a 1950s research worker on Musaceae at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad, Cheesman's 1930s place of work.
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