Botany, the study of plant species, and biology preoccupied humans for millennia. Since before Plato, rugged people rummaged the Earth, bent on discovering, collecting and classifying the planet’s plant life, then passed their hard-won knowledge, like a baton, down through the generations.
This work had its heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, when naturalists like Carl Linnaeus, Matthias Schleiden, Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel proffered increasingly sophisticated models for cataloging plant life, and neophyte botanists threw themselves into the unrelenting chore of procuring, curating and preserving samples of every plant species.
In 2014, the science of botany has largely abandoned its amateur roots, moving from hillsides and open moors to sterile laboratories capable of genetic sequencing.
But in Southwest Colorado, the old heroic spirit of amateur botany lives on in the San Juan/Four Corners Native Plant Society, which leads trips that cater to laymen with a budding interest in flora.
July is their busiest month.
“When people talk about the ‘height of the wildflower season,’ this is it,” said the society’s president, Al Schneider. “Right now is pretty much the high point, when the greatest number of species are blooming over the largest area of land, at every elevation from 5,000 feet to 14,000 feet,” he said.
On Tuesday, Schneider woke at 4 a.m. to lead a group of nine people on a four-hour hike north of Silverton. On Friday, he will lead another outing to Bridal Veil Creek outside Telluride. (For more about this hike, see Earth Briefs on Page 2B.)
The society keeps the groups small to ensure that beginners and experts can ask questions.
“The variation in people’s knowledge is remarkable,” said Bob Powell, a longtime member of the plant society.
He said on the one hand, the society includes people like Schneider, who is fluent in the esoteric language of wildflowers’ Latin names and whose passion for botany spurred him to discover several new plant species in Southwest Colorado – a miraculous achievement in the modern age when most plant species have already been exhaustively cataloged.
(Schneider champions an app for smartphones and tablets that helps less than accomplished identify wildflowers, available through his website, www.swcoloradowildflowers.com.)
But there are also newbies, said Powell, who relish the stunning scenery and delightful blooms offered on the society’s botanical tours.
Powell said he thought most average people would derive great pleasure from botany if only they tried it. Unlike some hobbyist communities, local wildflower lovers cherish curiosity, not extremism.
For instance, Powell said, even the most expert flower-seekers – who wield a jeweler’s magnifying glass to more closely examine petals’ and leaves’ gloss, color and rivets – tend to be less monomaniacal than zealous bird enthusiasts.
“Of course, I don’t want to insult birders, but there are bird people who climb 13,000-foot peaks to collect thousands of species of birds, and then write it all down. Whereas even dedicated plant people would never do that, make a list of all the plants they’ve seen,” he said.
Indeed, last year, The New Yorker magazine reported that Britain was cracking down on some birders after one man’s single-minded pursuit of ornithology landed him a lengthy prison sentence for thieving rare eggs from wild nests, which he sold to other extreme birders.
Powell acknowledged an exception among the generally even-keeled community of plant enthusiasts.
“There is one group of plant hobbyists who are rather fanatic about it, and that’s the mushroom people.” Powell said. “They will go to great lengths, rather compulsive, to find edible mushroom species. Whereas most people enjoy wildflowers because they’re beautiful, but they’re not totally dedicated to it.”
Travis Ward, who does publicity for the society, said he joined 10 years ago.
“I was a science major in college and taught science at Durango High School,” he said. “Wildflowers are a branch of science that you can actually experience, and enjoy with just basic knowledge, into your 70s,” he said.
He said the society’s tours attract people “scattered all around the Four Corners.”
Every summer, he leads a tour up Engineer Mountain.
“I love one flower that’s big and purple, and smaller flowers that you can’t appreciate without a hand lens,” he said. “But you don’t have to know anything. Just go out and buy a flower book and try to have fun.”
While flower-seeking is a low-stakes hobby, the flowers themselves are at risk from sheep and cattle grazing on public land that “gobble indiscriminately,” Schneider said.
“Deer and elk eat a little here, eat a little there and move on – they don’t clear cut, like sheep and a cattle,” he said.
One flower hike in the region had to be relocated after a rancher’s herd gorged on the meadow, but Schneider declined to say where because he did not want to single out the rancher.
Wildflowers are a “big financial industry in Colorado, bringing in tourists from all over the world, who travel here to see them on foot, in cars, with ATVs and on horse,” Schneider said. “Tens of thousands of people want to see wildflowers, and it takes one grazing permit to destroy them all.”
He said using a magnifying glass to peer at wildflowers, in all their glorious biological variety, taking in minute details, was like “going snorkeling with gear and seeing the coral reef.”
“Suddenly, you see a whole new world down there,” he said. “And once you begin doing that, you begin to appreciate the beauty of the world and protect it more. When you’re not aware of the beauty, who cares?”
cmcallister@durangoherald.com
Where to go
Bob Powell, longtime member of the San Juan/Four Corners Native Plant Society, offers some of the best places to see wildflowers that are accessible by car:
Coal Bank Pass meadow and Pass Creek Trail.
Little Molas Lake, just north of Molas Pass.
The parking lot for the Colorado Trail.
Lizard Head Pass, including Lizard Head Pass Trail and Cross Mountain Trail.
Cumberland Basin on the east side of La Plata Canyon.
