 then at the University of Wisconsin, where he met his future wife and lifelong collaborator, Alice Faber, a student at the time.In 1947, Tryon joined the faculty at Washington University in Saint Louis as an Associate Professor of Botany and became assistant curator in the herbarium of the Missouri Botanical Garden.Tryon left Missouri in 1957 to travel with Alice to Peru to study the fern flora of the American tropics.