Botanical Companions: A Memoir of Plants and Place

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments This book is a record of transformations both of my subjects and of my own. Its chapters are experiments. They tell stories in different ways, and their order is another story, in academic prose giving way to narrative and memory , about the ways we learn from (and about) people in specific places. A few simple facts led eventually to a long scholarly and personal project: I live and work where my subjects did, they were botanists, and I like plants. Each of these facts has a history, which in turn allowed other connections to happen between my subjects and me. Aven Nelson (1859–1952) was a botanist at the University of Wyoming; his second wife, Ruth Elizabeth Ashton (1896–1987), much his junior, was his partner in the field and companion during the last twenty years of his life. These naturalists brought work and play, learning, pleasure, and companionship together fairly seamlessly in their lives. Neither of the Nelsons wrote about what it was like to work outdoors, what the plants they collected made them think about, or what it was like to work together, though it is clear enough they enjoyed themselves, and both of them sustained long productive lives in close communication with the natural world. Their lives ended long before I came upon their documentary remains, and the Nel- sons remain mostly strangers to me, experts in a field that is not mine. But they lived in a place I know, and worked as botanists in meaningful and enjoyable ways which ultimately changed my own work in turn. Botany in the Rocky Mountain West is the fulcrum of my relationship to these people. Studying and exploring their experience of botany allowed me to learn from them rather than merely about them. I became aware of the Nelsons on a visit to the Rocky Mountain Herbarium at the University of Wyoming shortly after I arrived on campus in 1997 as a new faculty member in American studies. I had written to the botanists at the herbarium in the early 1990s, when I was studying with weed ecologist Bruce Maxwell at the University of Minnesota. At that time I was writing about the introduction and spread of weeds in the American West for a chapter of my dissertation. The dissertation was a cultural (and critical) reading of western agricultural history, published in 1996 as The Culture of Wilderness : Agriculture as Colonization in the American West. Visiting the herbarium in person was an opportunity to connect graduate research (which I had enjoyed very much) with my new place of employment (about which I knew almost nothing). The herbarium curator said I might be interested in the biography of the herbarium’s founder, written by a former University of Wyoming history professor. Reading Roger Williams’s Aven Nelson of Wyoming gave me the idea that I could make my study of agricultural history more concrete by writing about the work of an individual scientist who had, in Nelson’s case, taught at a land grant college, done research for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and founded an institution (the Rocky Mountain Herbarium) that represented an archival effort related to those undertaken by many federal agencies (of which I had been very critical in my first book). I think I expected information about Nelson’s life and career to fill in—at a fine scale—the fairly sweeping themes I had worked out in the book; not especially thoughtfully, I considered information about Nelson as data, merely the stuff of academic study. But it didn’t take long before Nelson became compelling as a person I wished I had known. He had made a whole life in Laramie, at the university, and in this particular landscape, where I was still struggling as a newcomer. Hardly equipped to examine Nelson’s accomplishments with critical distance, I realized (with delighted surprise) that I liked Nelson. He was a modest, soft-spoken man, a beloved teacher, a loyal husband and father. As a fellow faculty member at the University of Wyoming, I admired his professional success, which it seemed he had achieved against all odds, both institution2 | Preface and Acknowledgments ally and geographically. I became curious about him the way one is curious about an acquaintance, not a research subject. I wanted to know where his house was, and how his wives had contributed to his work (later...