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Colorado Flora Eastern Slope
By William A. Weber, Ronald C. Wittmann University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2012 William A. Weber and Ronald C. Wittmann
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-140-8
CHAPTER 1
BACKGROUND OF FLORISTIC WORK IN COLORADO
William A. Weber
Herbaria
Our knowledge of floras have their beginnings with the collecting of botanical specimens. Fortunately the habit of establishing herbaria, collections of dried plants, began long ago, perhaps in Italy. Reports not backed up by specimens in an herbarium are useless hearsay. These collections must be guarded from abuse, carelessness, and destruction by wars, for the very basis of our knowledge of plants rests on these. The actual specimen upon which a plant name is based is called a type specimen. Linnaeus' type specimens are deep underground in a bombproof vault in London. At the very end of hostilities in World War II the specimens of monocots that were carefully saved in caves by the curators of the Vienna Museum herbarium were discovered by American soldiers. It was a day for celebration, so those priceless specimens, thousands of them, were burned. Perhaps the greatest tragedy was the destruction of the Berlin herbarium during a bombing raid in March 1943. Accidents will happen, but as scientists we are bound to try to preserve what we can.
The local herbarium should be available to amateurs, government workers, and conservationists as a source of reliable information. Serious students should be encouraged to use the facility and volunteer their services.
Documentary collections should be considered vital archival materials, and must not be allowed to deteriorate even if their use decreases as emphasis on other disciplines increases. Detailed information should be maintained for local floras, and the label data should be put online so that it is practicable to trace state records to specimens. The University of Colorado Herbarium maintains a database providing the complete label data and a checklist for each of the 67 Colorado counties. The latter is an indispensable tool for the fieldworker, and, if space is at a premium, county lists will prevent cluttering the herbarium collections with superfluous common specimens. Many herbaria are available online, but as yet there is no central database for all herbaria.
The University of Colorado Herbarium (COLO)
It was many years before there was a large enough herbarium in Colorado to be considered important. In the early 1900s Colorado State College and the Colorado Historical Society each had a small herbarium. The University of Colorado Herbarium was established in 1946. It now contains over 300,000 vascular plant specimens, 112,000 lichens, 118,000 bryophytes, and smaller collections of algae, fungi, and slime molds, and is well known internationally.
When I came to Boulder, I immediately made my first visit to the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. When the director, Dr. Hugo Rodeck, asked me what I wanted to do at Boulder, I replied, "I would like to build an herbarium." His answer was "Do we need one?" Herbaria in those days rarely found a home in a museum but belonged to a teaching department of botany. Colorado had no botany department. At the time, the attic of the museum building did contain an herbarium, but it was the personal property of Joseph Ewan, who had left Colorado during World War II to join other botanists seeking new sources of quinine in South America. Because Ewan didn't receive the PhD, he was not invited back to Boulder, but moved to Louisiana, where he became the century's most renowned historian of American botany. He shipped his herbarium back to Tulane University.
The Colorado Historical Society donated their small herbarium of collections made by Alice Eastwood in the 1880s. She had been a teacher of classics at a Denver high school. Those precious specimens formed the tiny nucleus of what would become the University of Colorado Herbarium in 1946.
It was obvious that several things had to be done. For teaching purposes we needed to have an herbarium housed in the Museum and to ensure continuous curatorship and growth. Francis Ramaley, Professor of Biology at Boulder from 1898 to 1942, had collected ecological specimens; many of them were poor in quality, the collection was limited in scope and contained many duplicates. These were temporarily housed in the Museum by the Biology Department, but did not constitute an herbarium.
The Museum had no tenure-track faculty. The staff consisted of a director, the departmental secretary, and the preparator. Anyone else who worked in the museum did so on a volunteer basis. I was an instructor in the Biology Department and became a faculty member of the museum only in 1962 when the administration of CU President Quigg Newton collapsed and its provost Oswald Tippo moved me into the museum as a full professor. This freed me to teach what I wanted and to have time for botanical travel and research.
There was hardly any money to do all of the things necessary to build an herbarium. There was mounting, classifying, and label writing. Luckily I had learned to type with just my index fingers while typing briefs in a patent law firm in New York. Single labels were easy, but how to create masses of duplicate labels for exchange specimens? I started with a manual typewriter, then on to an electric one with balls of type, later picking up discarded machines from Norlin Library — tape machines such as the Flexowriter and Edityper. When we got into lichens and wanted to send out exchange sets of sixty duplicates, we needed something better, so we bought a small printing press, complete with a tray of type, and set the labels by hand.
A strong program of field collecting in Boulder County, followed by intense collecting throughout the state, was needed to build the collections. Many reports of the species in the state flora had to be verified. These were mostly to be found among the collections of the early transcontinental expeditions, housed in the few great herbaria of the eastern US: the New York Botanical Garden, Harvard University, the Philadelphia Academy of Science, Iowa State College (C. C. Parry), the Missouri Botanical Garden, and a few major herbaria of the West Coast (Pomona, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UCLA). The herbaria at Colorado College and Colorado State University were relatively small, although they were of great importance. For the University of Colorado herbarium I had to create a new and useful one that would aim at completeness. It would be necessary to borrow critical specimens to establish the validity of the identifications.
So collect I did. Naturally I began with the Boulder area, but soon began a project that would ensure the coverage of the whole state. I began with the corner counties: Baca, Montezuma, Moffat, and Sedgwick. Most of my fieldwork for the first few years was done in Boulder County and vicinity, but I took my students to the Western Slope for a long weekend every spring and began to fill the herbarium with much new material. During the summer I taught field botany at Science Lodge, now the University Mountain Research Station, and the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory at Gothic, north of Gunnison, and began serious collecting of the alpine flora. I also began to fill in the gaps in the collections at Mesa Verde National Park and established an herbarium at Dinosaur National Monument and Colorado National Monument. My students were all-important; we learned together and many of them have gone into professional teaching and research positions. My connection with them has never ebbed.
Early Floristic Efforts
Before Colorado began to be explored, Colorado plant species were being collected and described, but not from specimens collected in Colorado. Some were collected in colonial America, some by Lewis and Clark in Wyoming, some in Mexico by Sessé and Mociño, some in Europe, some in the Altai mountains of Siberia. The type specimens are scattered in great herbaria in different parts of the world. Most early collections of Colorado species are in the herbaria of Harvard University, the New York Botanical Garden, the Philadelphia Academy of Science, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.
Here are a few of those botanists who paved the way to the publication of Colorado Flora.
Edwin James (1797–1861)
The first important plant collections in Colorado, about 700 species, were made by Edwin James on Major Stephen H. Long's Expedition, 1820, which trekked along the South Platte River, down along the base of the Front Range, to the base of Mesa de Maya near the present village of Branson, thence on to New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. James collected the first alpine species in Colorado on a hike up Pikes Peak. Aquilegia coerulea, the state flower of Colorado, was collected on this historic expedition. George Goodman, my major professor at Iowa State, and his colleague Cheryl Lawson, retraced James' steps and brought together all aspects of the Long Expedition with critical evaluations of the collections and their histories (Goodman & Lawson 1995). Except for its lack of keys to the species, this book could serve very well as the first flora of Colorado, since it deals with the plants, their habitats, the campsites where they were collected, and the taxonomic changes that the names have undergone over almost two centuries.
Thomas C. Porter (1822–1901) and John M. Coulter (1851–1928)
A Synopsis of the Flora of Colorado, by Thomas C. Porter and John M. Coulter, 1874, was an outgrowth of the Hayden Surveys. It was the first of a planned series of publications aimed at introducing the flora to students and scientists who were beginning to discover Colorado: a detailed catalog of the flowering plants, with descriptions but no keys, and short lists of the bryophytes (by Leo Lesquereux), lichens (Henry Willey), and fungi (Charles H. Peck).
Alice Eastwood (1859–1952)
Alice Eastwood, born in Canada, came to Denver in 1873 and graduated from East High School. After graduation, she taught at the same school for about ten years. She never had any further schooling but earned enough to retire from teaching and devote her life to botanical studies. In 1889, upon hearing that T.D.A. Cockerell was living in Westcliffe, she visited him there and botanized with him. Cockerell (then 23 years old) left Colorado for England in 1889 after designating Miss Eastwood (then 29) secretary of his Colorado Biological Association. A letter from May 30 reads: "In case I do not again communicate with you before your departure I wish you a most pleasant journey and great happiness and prosperity on the new journey which you begin at the end of this. I have learned much from you, in some respects more than from anyone else. I do not hope to be able to return the obligation to you but perhaps I can, to my fellow man" (Weber 2004, p. 548). Alice Eastwood went on to California to become curator of the herbarium of the California Academy of Science in San Francisco, and eventually became America's most famous woman botanist. She became a heroine of the science when she thoughtfully segregated the type specimens and carried them out of the collapsing building during the great earthquake and fire of 1906.
The only flora available to Eastwood was Coulter's Manual of the Botany of the Rocky Mountain Region (1885). She felt that she should try to meet the needs of the local population, so she published A Popular Flora of Denver, Colorado (1893). She evidently was well enough known in Denver that when Alfred Russel Wallace came to Colorado he sought her out and they made a botanical excursion to Gray's Peak. A small number of her collections came to the University of Colorado Museum when the Colorado Historical Society broke up its herbarium in the 1930s.
Per Axel Rydberg (1860–1931)
Per Axel Rydberg's Flora of Colorado(1906) is of more than historical interest. Collections on which the book was based were made by Professors James Cassidy (1881–1889) and C. S. Crandall and a student, J. H. Cowen, who became professor following Crandall's retirement. Cowen died before he assumed his position. Since the college, now Colorado State University at Fort Collins, was unable to carry out further studies of the plants, an arrangement was reached with the New York Botanical Garden to have Dr. Rydberg, who had field experience in Utah, Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming, develop the eventually published flora.
Rydberg did fieldwork in Colorado only once, in July and August of 1900, with F. K. Vreeland, to the "Sierra Blanca" (Blanca Peak). Some sites visited were Turkey Creek and Indian Creek Pass, in Huerfano County, where they collected five to six thousand specimens, now at the New York Botanical Garden. Aside from the small herbarium that had accumulated at Fort Collins, Rydberg relied on studying T. C. Porter and J. M. Coulter's Synopsis of the Flora of Colorado; J. M. Coulter's Manual of the Botany of the Rocky Mountains; T. S. Brandegee's account of the Flora of Southwestern Colorado; John Torrey's report on the Edwin James collections made on the Long Expedition; Asa Gray's reports on the collections of C. C. Parry, Elihu Hall, and J. C. Harbour; E. L. Greene's various publications in Pittonia, Plantae Bakerianae, Leaflets of Western Botany, and the publications of Aven Nelson, M. E. Jones, George E. Osterhout, and Alice Eastwood; and the journals Zoë, Erythea, and the Proceedings of the California Academy of Science.
Alice Eastwood and T.D.A. Cockerell were the only resident botanists in Colorado in Rydberg's time. Most of the species known then had first been discovered in other states by transcontinental expeditions, such as Lewis and Clark, and the Hayden Surveys. There was little information about the habitats of Colorado plants. The most Rydberg could do in his flora was to make keys to the genera and the species, and list the known localities from the briefest statements on the specimen labels. The only field information Rydberg could use was from his own experience in neighboring states or territories.
A few of the striking things about his book may be mentioned here. The Flora of Colorado was the first place in which Rydberg attempted to make sense of the enormous genus Astragalus and to break this terribly unwieldy mess into, easily, eighteen smaller genera. These have never been accepted, but it was a sincere and justified attempt. He divided Gentiana (a genus that is, in the strict sense, exclusively Eurasian) into four genera. He divided Aster into twenty groups, Senecio into 17 groups (these still wait to be accorded generic status), and Cirsium (as Carduus) into nine. These remain the most difficult taxa in the Colorado flora.
Rydberg's reputation of being a great "splitter" has been exaggerated. It is true that his lack of field experience led him to name many "herbarium sheet species," but in the long run, scientists often find merit in his observations. As my friend Áskell Löve said to me, "It is better to split than to lump, because the lumper tends to lose valuable information." We should remember that in Rydberg's time, genetics was an infantile science, polyploidy and apomixis were unknown, and of course a hundred years of advances in our knowledge lay ahead.
T.D.A. Cockerell (1866–1948)
From age twenty-one Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell spent three years, 1887–1889, in Westcliffe, Wet Mountain Valley, because of a mild case of tuberculosis. He never had any postgraduate training, but he was already an accomplished naturalist in England, specializing in molluscs. Aside from making a bare living from doing chores, in Colorado he began to collect the entire biota of the Sangre de Cristo area, sending specimens and information to specialists all over the world, answering their questions about Colorado's flora and fauna, which were virtually unknown abroad. He encouraged his neighbor, Mrs. M. E. Cusack, to collect plants. Her collections eventually ended up in several herbaria of England, including the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. Cockerell returned to England, where he did research that helped Alfred Russel Wallace in his revision of Island Life. After a decade or so in Jamaica and New Mexico, he returned to Colorado and in 1904 came to the University at Boulder, where he spent the rest of his life. He became the world authority on wild bees and wrote a monograph on the plant genus Hymenoxys and a book on the zoology of Colorado. In 1906 he began serious excavations of the Florissant Fossil Beds, which eventually became a national monument. Cockerell was certainly the most famous resident naturalist of Colorado and did much to introduce Darwinian theory to the United States. He was also a humanitarian and a life-long socialist. For more detailed biographical information on Cockerell, see Weber 2000, 2004.
Leon Kelso (1907–1982)
The story of Leon Kelso is that of a potentially great opportunity missed. Kelso dearly wished to have a chance to write a flora of Colorado. He came to Colorado from Kansas to attend the University, attended the University of Denver and then the University of Colorado, where he planned to do graduate work in plant taxonomy. He was intensely interested in willows, Carex, and grasses, and knew a lot about the exciting geographic distributions of the alpine flora. He was told by the department head, "Who are you to work on Rocky Mountain plants, when Dr. Rydberg and Dr. Greene worked on them for 50 years? You, putting your ideas beside theirs; it is absurd. ... [I] would have no majoring in systematics here." Kelso wrote, "Taxonomic work in western botany has been obstructed by the closed shop policy that has existed in systematic natural history for the past thirty years." He left Colorado, broke all of his ties with our institutions, and began to publish his own journal, a flora of Colorado called Biological Leaflets. He went to the U.S. Biological Survey in Washington DC, where he became a specialist in identification of the stomach contents of small game birds and animals, earned a master's degree at Cornell, and published many papers on the owls of the world. He taught himself Russian and wrote reviews of Russian ornithological literature, finally becoming interested in electrostatic and bioelectronic phenomena concerning birds. In my mind, there is no doubt that if he had been encouraged, he had the potential to write a flora of Colorado.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Colorado Flora Eastern Slope by William A. Weber, Ronald C. Wittmann. Copyright © 2012 William A. Weber and Ronald C. Wittmann. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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