Botanical Companions: A Memoir of Plants and Place

Habeas Corpus

Habeas Corpus On 15 July 1959 in Glacier National Park near Avalanche Creek, Ruth Nelson wrote enigmatically in her travel journal: “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.”1 If she saw the true, correct image when she turned away from reflections, what was most true and correct was that she had turned and looked for herself. She spent a great deal of her life looking directly for things. As a young man,Tom Blaue remembered working with Ruth on her Plants of Zion National Park (1976, still in print), which he illustrated. She “rarely, if ever, missed anything. She assumed a certain posture when she was looking for flowers, ‘which was all the time,’” Blaue told Janet Robertson. “‘She’d throw her hands back and kind of clasp them behind her hips. She had about a three-quarter list and it was a pretty good angle for scouting ten feet in front of her. That’s the way she walked everywhere. She was in that pose about 100 percent of her waking hours and it served her quite well.’” Catching Blaue looking at a bird in a blazing Utah sky on a hot day, she snapped uncharacteristically and said, “Tom, you’d get more done if you’d keep your eyes on the ground.”2 Physician art thou?—one, all eyes, Philosopher!–a fingering slave, One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother’s grave? . . . Shut close the door; press down the latch; Sleep in thy intellectual crust; Nor lose ten tickings of thy watch Near this unprofitable dust. —William Wordsworth, “A Poet’s Epitaph” Ruth may not have missed much, but looking for her is an exercise in blanks. She gave hours and boxes of her husband’s papers to Roger Williams for his biography of Aven. She left a little correspondence, photographs , a few article typescripts, and her collection lists. She left slim fragments of travel journals from 1958 and 1959. She herself of course is dead. And Alice? A devoted nineteenth-century wife, mother of Aven Nelson’s children, helpmeet in the field, companion, housekeeper, and hostess. Her diary is not available. The Nelson family lies under the turf in Greenhill Cemetery in Laramie: Aven, Alice, Neva, and Helen. Ruth is elsewhere. They are all scattered like ashes. We couldn’t find Ruth (or Alice) if we tried, though there is enough information to understand that if we wanted to, we could fit her into a history of “gender and botany,” “women and science,” “wives of scientists,” which would begin with something like this in mind: Taxonomy I: Scientists Botanists Female Married Collaborated with spouse Varieties: 1. facilitates husband’s professional work 2. independently active (more likely if she completes education or begins research or publication before marriage) 3. delays until, or resumes independent work after, separation from or death of husband The diagnosis of an individual may show considerable variability of form over the course of her lifetime, including all three described varieties. Subvarieties are common. Exclusionary conditions limiting population of the taxa: generally race, class, and gender; in botany, gender to a significantly lesser extent, depending largely on marital status, education, and historical period (cultural factors). Habitat also widely variable, some indication that U.S. western and less prestigious institutions were historically more suitable for employment of married women botanists.3 104 | Habeas Corpus Taxonomy II: Scientists Married couples Varieties: 1. “Peaks of Collaborative Success: The Nobelist Couples” 2. “Couples Beginning in Student-Instructor Relationships” 3. “A Spectrum of Mutually Supportive Couples” 4. “Couples Devolving from Creative Potential to Dissonance”4 Each taxon includes women among the population, and assumes collaboration as fundamental to the practice of scientific work; women’s negotiations with the “second shift” of housework and childraising may be assessed ; variations of experience over time and across disciplines may be compared. Habitat undifferentiated.5 Depending on the scholarly sieve, we could also describe Ruth Nelson within the social history of westerners, community life of Laramie or Estes Park, or the lives and outlooks of field guide writers. Or, depending on your cynicism, cast all the Nelsons off as unremarkable white middle-class people of a certain generation, may they rest in peace, etc. All histories in which their...