Botanical Companions: A Memoir of Plants and Place

by Frieda Knobloch, Wayne Franklin (Foreword by)

Overview

In her luminous inquiry into the intricate connections among work, place, and people, Frieda Knobloch explores the lives of two Rocky Mountain botanists, Aven Nelson (1859-1952) and Ruth Ashton Nelson (1896-1987). Aven was a professor of botany at the University of Wyoming for many years; Ruth compiled field guides to Rocky Mountain plants and wrote articles on botany for magazines. The two met and married when Aven was in his seventies and Ruth was in her mid thirties, and they developed a symbiotic partnership that joined work and play, learning and companionship. Into this relatively straightforward reconstruction of two lives Knobloch blends the history of her own life as a scholar and an amateur naturalist, her own journal entries, and her letters written to Ruth to create a transformative environmental auto/biography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781587294525
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	05/01/2005
Series:	American Land & Life
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	198
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Frieda Knobloch is an associate professor of American studies and women's studies, School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Wyoming in Laramie. She is the author of The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West.

Read an Excerpt

Botanical Companions A Memoir of Plants and Place
By Frieda E. Knobloch
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2005 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-920-0



Chapter One Work in Place

This is a brief study of the role of place in shaping intellectual work, particularly scientific field work about that place, in an individual life. The work included botany and public advocacy for people's knowledge and pleasure in the nonhuman world, especially where they lived; the place was and is Wyoming, including the University of Wyoming in Laramie; and the individual was Aven Nelson (1859-1952). Nelson began collecting specimens for the University of Wyoming at the turn of the last century when laboratory work held greater prestige, creating a career and a regional herbarium in a location that remains on a far edge of American academic life. Nelson's geographical isolation in the West prevented him from securing a prestigious education early in the twentieth century, and the direct experience (much less love) of nature at home lay outside formal botanical education. Nevertheless, his fieldwork and teaching in Wyoming became the heart of Nelson's own understanding of his science, and deeply shaped his beliefs about sharing scientific knowledge with the public as well as his students. Intellectual work can be shaped permanently by place-institutionally, intellectually, and emotionally. This attempt to show, in one botanist's life, how that might happen raises a few questions historians might ask about western institutions and the careers that form (in) them. It also serves as an invitation to ask such questions about ourselves.

Locating Nelson's (or anyone's) work in a place demands a few words about both place and work. Place matters-so we've been told by environmentally sensitive writers pleading for a wider appreciation of the particularities of "place," natural and social (often both). Their hope is to stem the tide of thoughtless transformation of singular places into no-place, generic expressions of consumer "culture" and urban sprawl, without memory or intimacy, community or diversity, human and otherwise. Terry Tempest Williams, Linda Hasselstrom, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Wendell Berry, among others, excavate their home places for us, their emotional responses to nature and community, their childhood and adult reckonings with "place," guiding us to the natural and social peculiarities we're likely to overlook in our own backyards. Some of them moving, many of them sentimental or nostalgic, a whole life that includes paid work seldom enters these accounts. (The notable exception is Wendell Berry, whose corpus is an extended paean to work in place.) For most writers on "place," the paid activity that ties us to the commercial forces overwhelming the nonhuman world is what distracts us from place, or damages places, so much so that environmental historian Richard White had to argue strenuously in The Organic Machine (1995) that people's work could be a source of knowledge about and intimacy with the nonhuman world in specific environments. White castigated an entire environmental tradition with the very title of his essay, "Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?" The work in question is manual work: fishing, logging, mining, and agriculture.

Intellectual work "takes place" too, though we don't know much about the relationship between this kind of work and a full reckoning with place-the limits, the opportunities for curiosity and emotional response it engenders. Academics are rewarded for the prestige of their degrees and their fluency in the languages of abstract "fields," not their full habitation (including work) in places. When home institutions lie low in the hierarchy of academies, scholars have an incentive to inhabit the fields of their colleagues with more sense of accomplishment and connection than they may feel at home. Whole careers are made routinely from material that has nothing to do with home-in fact, the farther away from home and everyday experience the better (someone else's home and everyday experience are of course fair game).

We do know something about "field work," the intellectual work certain scientists do in specific places, including natural ones. Scientists' field work is a valuable source of information on the physical and biological character of any place. But writers on the subject of field work have been preoccupied with the meanings of field science and experience, not the place(s) where these things happen. "The field" is not assumed to be a permanent home-it is an exotic or removed scene of a special kind of science, having something in common with travel, tourism, colonial administration, and the purposeful and accidental confusions of identity and status that accompany such ventures. "Place" may shape intellectual work in the field, but accounts of how it does so serve an understanding of large patterns of science, and ignore the constraining and inviting powers of those specific environments, including institutions within those environments, to shape whole lives as well as scientific insight. The outlook of Harold Dorn's The Geography of Science (1991), which explores the relationship between environments and the sciences that developed in them, is somewhat more useful in this context: "Science ... changes over space and in the context of environmental conditions, and in some situations its development has as much to do with geography as history." But Dorn documents mainstream science on a large scale (mathematics, engineering, astronomy, for example, in classical high cultures), and much is lost on the scale of understanding the local, the individual, and the marginal or ephemeral, the scale of this particular study.

Aven Nelson was born in Iowa in 1859, and became a member of the first faculty at the University of Wyoming when it opened in 1887. He founded the Rocky Mountain Herbarium there in 1893, and enjoyed a long career as a botanist of the Rocky Mountain region. He was remembered as a "lifetime prof.[essor] of botany," who "botanized widely over the Rocky Mountain region building the important herbarium at Laramie," one "whose lifespan as an active field botanist exceeds that of all other outstanding western botanists." Locally, his now-elderly students remember him as a gifted teacher, and Senator Alan Simpson and his brother Pete Simpson discuss Nelson as a significant figure in Wyoming history in their spring course at the University of Wyoming, "Wyoming Political Identity." Nelson curated the Rocky Mountain Herbarium for fifty years, served as university president from 1917 to 1922, and as president of the Botanical Society of America in 1935, the first national officer of that organization to be elected from the Rocky Mountain West. His first wife, Celia Alice Calhoun, and their two daughters accompanied his botanical exploration of Yellowstone Park in 1899, where Alice maintained their camps and helped to press and dry plants. After Alice's death in 1929, Nelson courted his second wife, Ruth Elizabeth Ashton. He was seventy-two. A master's student in botany then working on a field guide to the flora of Rocky Mountain National Park nearby in Colorado, Ruth was thirty-five. The couple married in 1931 and enjoyed nearly two decades of companionship and collaboration before his death in 1952; after a long career of her own authoring field guides and popular articles, she died in 1987.

Speaking as a senior member of his profession to the Botanical Society of America in 1935, Nelson said that he had been educated for "teaching and administration" in public schools before he came to Wyoming to teach English. Nelson quickly found himself "slated for Biology, a field in which [he] had no training, except," he said, "a boy's unsatisfied curiosity in regard to the native flowers that grew in the ravines and on the clay hillsides of the open forest of oak and hickory." Zoologically, his "training had been of the most practical sort," chasing squirrels, rabbits, and game birds with his dog and a long-barreled Norwegian shotgun. Nelson's remarks to his colleagues intended to show how little he knew in the 1880s, but the boy's curiosity and his experience with well-known flora and fauna in Iowa, where he was born, were good training for his later work as a field botanist who was a remarkable teacher and respected naturalist in Wyoming. Looking back over a successful career in 1935, he could afford to admit a humble beginning. He had carved his prestige from a profession that grudgingly recognized the small western institution he helped to build and the underprivileged field work that gave him his professional identity and knowledge of home.

Institutionally, Nelson faced serious obstacles to professional development for decades after he arrived in Wyoming. His difficulty began immediately, and hinged on the unforgiving geography of expertise that privileged certain degrees from specific (primarily eastern) institutions for emerging specialists of any kind by 1900. Nelson was hired to teach English, but university president John Hoyt had inadvertently hired two people for the same post, so the job went to a man with a Dartmouth MA in English (who left no mark in his field). Nelson had only a degree from Missouri State Normal College. He taught biology, but also geography and calisthenics, in a "university" of six faculty members that still had to produce its own high school graduates before it could begin the business of postsecondary education. The campus was a single sandstone building amid acres of native prairie. "Prexy's pasture," the manicured quadrangle now in the middle of campus, was then good habitat and hunting ground for sage grouse.

Hardly optimistic about the future of this institution, Nelson eventually asked for leave without pay to get a graduate degree in biology at Harvard in 1891-1892, hoping not to have to return to Laramie as a permanent residence. While he was away, the university's horticulturalist Burt Buffum collected plants of all kinds, preparing the forage plants for Wyoming's (award-winning) display at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Nelson faced the job of identifying Buffum's leftover plants on his return from Harvard with an MA. Nelson knew nothing about plant taxonomy-he'd studied biology, not much botany, though it's questionable whether he would have acquired formal field and taxonomic instruction even if he had studied more (a point to which we'll return). He identified these plants by using a small collection of botanical books, and stored the specimens, planning to add others from Wyoming and eventually Colorado and the central Rocky Mountain area (not to mention more books to the university's library).

What had begun with an odd assignment took a simple turn: he really enjoyed this work. He began his own collecting in 1894, and looking back years later he said, "more and more material became my prime desideratum," and "the things I did when I could do as I pleased were field and herbarium work." The university trustees officially recognized his growing collection as the Rocky Mountain Herbarium in 1899. His unexpected joy in the field and herbarium in Wyoming was the accidental beginning of Nelson's career as a botanist, and at the same time the kiss of death for his ambition to work elsewhere.

As he became more involved in the tasks of field collecting and herbarium organization in Wyoming (alongside his other duties, not to mention family life with two young daughters), he unsuccessfully sought new positions. One of his Harvard instructors, William F. Ganong, informed him frankly in 1895 that he could go nowhere without a PhD. Residency requirements at prominent botanical schools and the necessity of keeping up with all his work at home made the PhD an uncertain goal at best. The work that gave him the most pleasure in Wyoming was also difficult because he was in Wyoming. Plant collection was easy enough, but identification and publication were not. Nelson had no authority whatsoever as a botanist through most of the 1890s.

The bright lights of botanical knowledge were far from Wyoming-Benjamin Robinson at Harvard, Edward Greene at Berkeley (and after 1895, Catholic University), and his rival and contemporary in western botany, Per Axel Rydberg at Columbia and the New York Botanical Garden. These men enjoyed not only associations with prestigious institutions, but access to large, well-established herbaria on the East Coast, the backbone of taxonomic plant study. Nelson's MA allowed him to stand credibly before classrooms of botany and zoology students, and elementary teachers in training, but that was all. As he struggled to gain professional standing after he began collecting in 1894, he had nothing like Harvard's Gray Herbarium at hand where he could compare plants he found with other specimens that had already been named by genus and species, as Benjamin Robinson never failed to remind him. For years Nelson relied on the competing determinations of botanists at more prominent institutions as he went about his work in Wyoming. Worse, his rival Rydberg was a "splitter"-he tended to assign new genus and species names to plants that Nelson (a "lumper") would have recognized as varieties of known species. Rydberg's position at the New York Botanical Garden by itself could easily trump Nelson's expertise regardless of his burgeoning knowledge of and immersion in Rocky Mountain flora.

Still, in 1898 Nelson began to publish articles on the plants he collected. Though botanists regularly contest each other's plant identifications, some of Nelson's earliest "discoveries" still stand, including Phlox multiflora-a common ground-hugging plant in alpine prairie whose white flowers are among the first to open in spring. John Coulter rewarded Nelson's familiarity with Rocky Mountain plants by choosing Nelson to revise his 1885 Manual of the Plants of the Rocky Mountain Region, a long task Nelson began in 1901. This was the only professional break Nelson ever received.

The University of Wyoming remained poorly funded and administered while Nelson dug himself hip deep in botanical research. By 1900 he was very busy acquiring knowledge and plants but also advising Wyoming residents about municipal beautification, gardening, tree planting, and agriculture in his teaching, traveling, corresponding. Through an arrangement with a former Laramie friend and fellow member of the Methodist church who became a faculty member at the University of Denver, Nelson finally received his PhD in 1904 for a portfolio of articles he had already published. PhD in hand, he published his revision of Coulter's Manual in 1909, but by then in midcareer, he gave up seeking other positions. He sustained his reputation through building the Rocky Mountain Herbarium, publishing species new to science from the Rocky Mountain West, and advising the Wyoming public on planting for beauty and agriculture. Given the haphazard (even illegitimate) nature of Nelson's academic credentials, and the institutionally remote location of his work, Nelson wrested a slim prestige in his field from the outer darkness of Wyoming.

Wyoming was not an outer darkness of field experience, however. The one advantage Nelson had, the very thing his eastern mentors and rivals lacked, was his access to-an overabundance of-the field. His home institution and his whole life lay smack in the middle of it. And he loved being in it. The most prestigious botanists were not active field collectors, even if they had established their botanical careers that way; some, like Rydberg, specialized in western flora expensively far from home. Asa Gray's responsibilities as a laboratory taxonomist and administrator eventually left him too busy to collect at all. The Rocky Mountain West provided the only riches Nelson had in creating a career and a regional herbarium. In addition, Nelson's duties as a teacher (particularly of younger teachers) called on him to describe the purpose of scientific training and excite young people in botanical study. This would have been much less pleasant or effective had he approached it with abstract scientific discipline and distance from the field, much less disdain for his location. Working for a land grant college dedicated to public service and coeducation, most of Nelson's students would be children of his Wyoming neighbors, only a few of them destined for more elite institutions. He did seek "better" appointments for a while, but entrenched in Laramie, he embraced his marginality twice over: Nelson was a sincerely committed member of the UW faculty till his retirement in 1938, while he plunged whole-heartedly into primary field and taxonomic work that his profession as a whole left behind. His position at Wyoming in fact allowed him to discover, express, and teach values of field learning he might easily have been distracted from elsewhere.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents Foreword by Wayne Franklin Preface and Acknowledgments Work in Place Specimens Album Letters Habeas Corpus Collecting Red Desert Reprise Notes Bibliography