In Big Tree Merwin and Louise are named for real people. Merwin, who starts off life very uptight and scientific, was named after the poet William Stanley Merwin (1927-2019), the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2010 who twice won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. And Louise, who is very dreamy and poetic, was named for a scientist, Dr. Louise Colville, a seed specialist at Kew Gardens in the United Kingdom.
Here is more information about both of these fascinating people.
W.S. Merwin was born in New York City, and he grew up in Union City, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Paula moved to Hawaii in the 1970’s where they purchased a a former pineapple plantation whose soil had been ruined, and began nursing the barren land back to health. They eventually planted 500 species of palm trees, creating one of the largest and most diverse palm forests in the world. Today, this forest is the centerpiece of the Merwin Conservancy, which can be visited on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Merwin could trace his love of the natural world directly back to his childhood in Union City, New Jersey, where he found himself drawn “as by a magnet,” to weeds and grasses growing up from the cracks in the sidewalk. He was amazed when his mother assured him that the Earth was waiting there, full of life, beneath the concrete. It’s in honor of Merwin and this memory that I created the last chapter in the book “Sixty Six Million Years Later.”
Dr. Louise Colville is the Senior Research Leader of Seed and Stress Biology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, England, where she leads a research group focusing on the functional traits in the seeds of wild plant species. She studies germination, longevity and stress resiliencein seeds, all of which are important for conservation, global agriculture and food security. You can learn more about her here.