Botanical Companions: A Memoir of Plants and Place

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Album aries Ruth Elizabeth Ashton was born 29 November 1896 in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Ruth told Aven’s biographer, Roger Williams, that she was “reared on Martha’s Vineyard where her interest in plants first blossomed during her childhood.”1 Former student Jane Ramsey, who took classes from Ruth in Rocky Mountain National Park and interviewed her in 1984, said she was “devoted to botany” and that knowing plants was a “life-long passion.”2 Friends described how she “came alive in the midst of flowers, wild or domesticated.”3 taurus Ruth’s parents, Willard and Grace Ashton, were evidently both high-minded and fairly wealthy. They ran a settlement house in Boston, and began looking into recreational and real estate opportunities in Estes Park, Colorado, in 1905.4 Willard commissioned a design by Frank Lloyd Wright for an inn in nearby Horseshoe Park, but discarded the design and built an Adirondackstyle lodge instead.5 As a young woman, Ruth had sufficient resources to buy 240 acres above Estes Park herself in 1925, and named her property Skyland Ranch.6 5-25-56 written a few miles up canyon of Lake Fork of the Gunnison where Sue has just caught one nice fish in very muddy & high water—saw an ouzel about which flew up side canyon where is a small stream of clear water . . .7 gemini Aven Nelson hired Ruth in the herbarium in 1930 because her work on a popular guide to Rocky Mountain National Park plants “squared well with his own ambitions for a dual-purpose manual.”8 Once she began work, Aven described her “as very competent and as sympathetic to the proposed format of the revised manual.”9 In a Christmas card in 1931, Ruth’s friend, Anna Lute, wrote, “I had no inkling of your plans. I did think however that you seemed happier than usual the evening of your nice party—and I am sure with your many common interests your life together will be the happy one which we all wish you.”10 James Feucht, editor of Green Thumb magazine, thanked Ruth in 1961 for her series on gardening with Colorado wild plants: “We are always pleased to receive your well-written and authoritative articles.”11 74 | Album Ruth was well informed, gentle as a teacher, “humble with her knowledge.” Jane Ramsey remembered how Ruth taught a class about fragile tundra ecology in part by teaching students how to walk through it, from one rock to the next.12 cancer Grace Ashton suffered an illness that precipitated the family’s first move to Martha’s Vineyard early in Ruth’s childhood. After 1905, Grace went off with the children for months at a time to Iowa, Illinois, Estes Park, and Martha’s Vineyard, interrupting their formal educations but teaching them herself at home. She believed they could learn more from the outdoors than they could in a classroom.13 Grace was interested in botany and loved flowers; with her mother’s copy of Gray’s Manual, Ruth collected flowers and leaves around Estes Park and identified them for her mother. For Grace’s fortieth birthday in 1905, Ruth and her sister decorated the cake with forty different species of wildflowers.14 Ruth returned to Colorado after college to work. She remained in Colorado after her husband’s death. Friends remembered Ruth as a “‘shy, retiring and very private person,’ not easy to know.”15 Illustrator and friend Beatrice (Bettie) Willard said of Ruth that she had “a deep affection for, devotion to, and comprehension of the land and its diverse plant cover. . . . She expresses profound quiet reverence for the natural world through everything she says and does.”16 Orra Phelps (1895–1986) was another woman whose mother’s intense (in this case professionally trained) interest in plants, and equally intense family instability, gave her a medium for both enjoying and learning about the natural world, and creating her own world of work and companionship all of a piece with the Adirondack wilderness where she lived. Her mother Album | 75 botanized to be alone; Orra’s botany and Adirondack mountaineering was social.17 Reflections—objects passing behind me (as I sit in the car) are imperfectly reflected in the opposite glass of the windows—by turning to reality I see the true, correct image.18 leo Ruth intended to run a girls’ camp at Skyland Ranch. This never...