Bunzo Hayata (1874-1934) is regarded as the founding father of the study of the flora of Taiwan for having given scientific names to 1,636 new taxa of plants from Taiwan. From 1905, when he took on a commission from the Japanese Governor-General of Taiwan to identify plant specimens collected by government botanists, to 1924, the Japanese botanist spent 19 years devoted to pursuing his profound fascination with the plants of Taiwan.

In August, NTU Press released the first biography of Hayata to be published in Taiwan. Titled Bunzo Hayata: The Making of Plantarum Formosanarum, the book surveys the course of the botanist's life, demonstrating how the atmosphere of the times he inhabited served to provoke his interest in botany and how a chance job led him to devote nearly two decades of his life to surveying and documenting the flora of Taiwan and become a major figure in the establishment of Taiwan's plant taxonomy.

Hayata focused on many aspects of botany, including taxology, morphology, anatomy, and cytology. Over the ten-year period of 1911 to 1921, Hayata compiled and published his masterwork, Icones Plantarum Formosanarum, a collection of ten volumes that drew international acclaim for documenting thousands of plant species in Taiwan.

In his later years, he grew more involved with religion and philosophy and went on to develop a unique system for plant classification called the Dynamic System, which did not accept Darwin's theory of evolution and influenced countless later scholars.

The pioneering botanist played an major role in the history of the natural sciences in Taiwan, achieving his greatest accomplishments during the glory years of modern botany in Taiwan. The large conifer Taiwania cryptomerioides (Hayata, 1906) remains among the most well known of the plants he named.
The new biography fills an important gap in our understanding of the long-neglected subject of the study of Taiwan's natural history during the Japanese colonial era.