I have a nineteenth-century girlfriend
her name is Annie Sawyer downs and she’s
roughly 140 years older than me but we
both grew up in Massachusetts we both
love the Maine coast
we both have weird professional
connections to Henry David Thoreau
we’re both botanists who like to verb
the noun botanist
we like to say we’re going botanizing I
fell in love with Annie when I read her
1892 magazine article how I bought nice
the things I provide myself with when I
go botanizing our pocket knife a pair of
scissors in a case a little ball of soft
string and a tin box which is carried by
a strap over my shoulder I wear a plain
skirt short and full a round hat with a
rim wide enough for shade a pair of
strong gloves with gauntlets and shoes
of sensible thickness with broad soles
and low heels when I go botanizing I
wear trail runners which if you think
about it our shoes of sensible thickness
with broad soles and low heels I wear
old race t-shirts and athletic clothing
made from technical fabric I wear
baseball caps instead of a round hat and
my gloves have magical touch screen pads
on the fingertips because instead of
collecting plant specimens in a tin box
I snap photographs and record data on my
smartphone but as much as the attire has
changed botanizing getting outside and
studying plants is almost timeless in
the same magazine piece annie writes it
will take patience patience patience but
nothing more there is no magic about it
only attention and perseverance this
motto carried me through my PhD I met or
I met Annie early in graduate school
when I was working in Acadia National
Park and Maine where I studied the
ecological effects of climate change on
plant communities studying climate
change in New England is tough our plant
communities have been subjected to a
great deal of change European settlement
agricultural abandonment waves of
development
plain vanilla year-to-year variation
we’ve been burning fossil fuels for a
long
time coinciding with all of these other
processes and scientists have only
recently started to look for the
ecological effects of climate change so
while we know a lot about our current
plant communities the after ordering
pictures of our planetary makeover
we need more before pictures Henry David
Thoreau is a powerful before picture his
journals contain records of the dates of
flowering and leaf out in Concord
Massachusetts the timing of flowering
and leaf out ecologists call this
phenology is tied to spring temperatures
most plants bloom earlier in warm years
and later in cool years and these small
phenological events can ripple out
across an ecosystem if flowering occurs
before pollinators are flying or if an
early leafing invasive species shades
out the later leaves of a native plant
there are consequences for reproduction
competition and food webs these
long-term datasets of leaf out and
flowering phenology like the rose
journals can tell us how plants respond
to changes in climate the Rose not
unusual for noticing seasonal changes or
recording phenology in his journal but
he has influential name recognition my
PhD advisor always refers to the town as
the rose Concord and he loves to use the
Thoreau connection to start
conversations with sirot you can talk
about climate change without polar bears
or icebergs his data is simple and local
and recognizable Thoreau it turns out
new my 19th century girlfriend
they were both residents of Thoreau’s
Concord in the 1840s and 1850s Thoreau
was or Annie was born while Thoreau was
a Harvard student and as a kid she used
to follow him through the fields and
woods of Concord on botanizing trips a
century and a half later I would find
myself following my adviser who was
following the rose notes through the
fields and woods of Concord once again
when I started graduate school I set out
to find the Thoreau of the north
expected that the archives at Acadia
National Park on Mount Desert Island
would be full of journals as detailed
and meticulous as the rose and in Acadia
I could ignore some of the development
pressures that plague studies in
Thoreau’s conquered because Acadia has
been a national park since 1916 in the
decades before 1916 Mount Desert Island
supported farming fishing granite
quarries sawmills
two groups of people summered on the
island the wealthy East Coast elites in
their lavish hotels and cottages and the
Wabanaki who had lived on the Maine
coast for thousands of years and now set
up summer encampments in the villages
annie was one of the summer cottage
people she was a schoolteacher in
Andover Massachusetts and in the 1880s
she and her husband built a house on the
island bone desert island is a little
over 100 square miles of granite ridges
glacially carved ponds and wetlands
rolling hills and rocky intertidal zones
it’s less than 1% of the land of the
state of Maine but it contains over half
of the natural plant communities on the
state in 1894 it supported 680 plant
species including 106 that are locally
extinct today we know this because a
group of college boys who bonded over
their shared interests in natural
history and documenting themselves left
behind a goldmine of historical records
these college boys called themselves the
Champlain society the society formed in
1880 in a Harvard dorm room with the
intent of spending the summer exploring
the natural history of Mount Desert
Island
they kept daily log books full of
entries like the Champlain Society flag
design their field excursions
epic poems describing their exploits
photographs of their campsite and
progress towards their goals in the
department’s of botany
ornithology geology in the winter they
convened dinner parties complete with
letterpress printed menus at which the
department’s presented annual reports
and made plans for the next summer
membership lasted long after Harvard
graduation the last Champlain Society
logbook is from the summer of 1888 and
many of the boys grew up to own houses
on the island as adults their writing is
credited with spurring some of the first
conversations around conservation and a
national park on Mount Desert Island but
from my perspective they’re most
incredible contribution is creating a
botanist out of a pre-law student and
getting him to publish the floor of
Mount Desert Island Maine in 1894 Edward
loether brand the chair of the botanical
department was the lawyer botanist he
led the department’s efforts to compile
a complete list of every plant species
on the island in the Champlain Society
log books he appears as an earnest and
studious kid while the other Champlain
Boys row boats across Nome sound to meet
the young ladies at the fashionable
hotels ran stays behind to work on his
BOTS nicing mission Rand graduated from
Harvard College and then Harvard Law
School the society disbanded and yes he
continued to come back summer after
summer to boughten eyes on Mount Desert
Island and work on his book the
Champlain Society log books and the
Botanical Department reports are
littered with the names of other
scientists and hobbyists who studied the
islands plants and ferns and mosses and
orchids Rand worked with all of them I
copied down those names and searched the
archives hoping that one of these
collaborators would be record recorded
the dates of flowering or leaf out on
that desert island in the 19th century I
expected to find my dissertation my
thorough instead I found Annie Annie has
cited over 25 times in grants flora
she’s the source for a fern a moss for
orchids a crow berry a plantain a catnip
a skullcap a mint a Bellflower still
today there are pressed plants at
Harvard that she collected with Edward
Rand
I love thinking about this Annie was in
her 40s botanizing around this island
with a twenty-something Harvard boy
anny
discovered rhododendron road aura forma
Alba flora a white road aura typically a
road aura has deep purple petals with
indigo freckles it’s in the same family
as blueberries and Huckleberry’s and it
blooms before it Leafs out creating the
illusion of a plant engulfed in violet I
had never heard of a white road aura
before and so when I read about Inez I
hunted down her or barium specimen at
Harvard’s Grey herbarium in tight-knit
script she describes this flower pure
white was collected on the island in
1888 in 2013 I stumbled across a plant
with bright white petals in the middle
of a patch of standard-issue purple row
Dora the white road Dora sat in the
saddle between Cedar Swamp mountain and
Sargent mountain in Acadia National Park
it was my favorite spot that spring
capturing photographs of the whites of
Roe Dora made me feel a kinship with
Annie at the time I was struggling to
track down her field books or records
she wrote so meticulously about botany
and her magazine pieces that I was sure
she must have kept log books full of
detailed notes maybe even dates of
flowering but my searches came up empty
finding the white road Dora was like
finding a piece of Annie alive on the
island I haven’t seen it since the white
road Dora is apparently an ephemeral
phenomenon I’m telling the story of
Annie Sawyer downs because her field
books if they existed didn’t make it to
posterity there are no epic poems or
hand-drawn flags for her her
contributions are recorded in the scraps
of other stories
she’s a citation a specimen label a note
next to the description of her summer
cottage still standing in southwest
Harbor
I love Annie perhaps because she is half
shadow and it’s easy for me to project
this relationship between us I bought
knives where she botton eyes so we must
be soulmates Annie is who I would have
been if I had been born in the 1830s
instead of the 1980s
the end of the 19th century was an
interesting time in botany especially in
Maine Maine was still a bit of a
frontier there were new species to
discover but also railroads and
steamships to carry your specimens home
to Harvard and civilization the
Champlain Society represents an age of
amateur enthusiasm for Natural History
the society members all pursued careers
outside of science while on ironically
pledging their loyalty and their field
summers to the Society’s scientific
goals in the years after the society
disbanded efforts to professionalize the
natural sciences made this mix of non
science students on Natural History
excursions increasingly rare and since
it was the 19th century
professionalization meant flipping the
narrative to emphasize the masculinity
of botany flowers had an effeminate
reputation in Maine there’s good reason
for this among the most prolific and
most badass of 19th century botanist is
Kate furbish who explored the allagash
river in remote Aroostook County while
producing beautiful and detailed
watercolors of the plants of Maine
Edward Rand was remembered by his
colleagues as a capital tramper but
furbished his fieldwork makes rands time
on Mount Desert Island look like a trip
to the spa in 1881 furbish published a
record of her time botanizing in
Aroostook County
six years later science published a
short piece with the rhetorical title is
botany a suitable study for young men
their answer was of course yes it builds
mental discipline and promotes physical
activity with the subtext that it was
not suitable for young women the New
England Botanical Club assumed this
perspective when it formed in 1895 and
women were excluded from membership into
the 1960s but in the last year’s of the
19th century
Annie continued to write and botton eyes
in 1892 she publishes how I bought
knives in 1894 she was cited in the book
the orchids of New England in 1895 she
headlined a meeting of the
Mountain Club I loved Annie because she
got just enough of herself into the
history books right in science and the
New England Botanical Club were erecting
there no girls allowed signs I love how
she writes about botany and how the
stories of her that survive paint the
portrait of a capable and practical
botanist and I really love knowing that
in the summers when the Champlain
Society was setting off fireworks at
their campsite and hosting canoe races
amongst themselves and he was on the
island to the study presence of a
middle-aged woman who wore shoes of a
sensible thickness and packed a
pocketknife
[Applause]
yeah so I have a follow-up question
so did Annie make it into your
dissertation unfortunately she didn’t I
never found any records that she had
kept so while I used all of Edward rands
on the floor of Mount Desert Island to
look at how plant communities had
changed over time so I could say these
things became more abundant these things
disappeared I couldn’t really look at
how changes in flowering time had
happened on the island but recording
phonology is back in fashion and so
everyone can get the National phenology
networks app on their phone and make
their own records just like Thoreau and
like Annie probably did and health
ecologists like me to track changes in
tidings of flowering and leaf out
[Applause]
her name is Annie Sawyer downs and she’s
roughly 140 years older than me but we
both grew up in Massachusetts we both
love the Maine coast
we both have weird professional
connections to Henry David Thoreau
we’re both botanists who like to verb
the noun botanist
we like to say we’re going botanizing I
fell in love with Annie when I read her
1892 magazine article how I bought nice
the things I provide myself with when I
go botanizing our pocket knife a pair of
scissors in a case a little ball of soft
string and a tin box which is carried by
a strap over my shoulder I wear a plain
skirt short and full a round hat with a
rim wide enough for shade a pair of
strong gloves with gauntlets and shoes
of sensible thickness with broad soles
and low heels when I go botanizing I
wear trail runners which if you think
about it our shoes of sensible thickness
with broad soles and low heels I wear
old race t-shirts and athletic clothing
made from technical fabric I wear
baseball caps instead of a round hat and
my gloves have magical touch screen pads
on the fingertips because instead of
collecting plant specimens in a tin box
I snap photographs and record data on my
smartphone but as much as the attire has
changed botanizing getting outside and
studying plants is almost timeless in
the same magazine piece annie writes it
will take patience patience patience but
nothing more there is no magic about it
only attention and perseverance this
motto carried me through my PhD I met or
I met Annie early in graduate school
when I was working in Acadia National
Park and Maine where I studied the
ecological effects of climate change on
plant communities studying climate
change in New England is tough our plant
communities have been subjected to a
great deal of change European settlement
agricultural abandonment waves of
development
plain vanilla year-to-year variation
we’ve been burning fossil fuels for a
long
time coinciding with all of these other
processes and scientists have only
recently started to look for the
ecological effects of climate change so
while we know a lot about our current
plant communities the after ordering
pictures of our planetary makeover
we need more before pictures Henry David
Thoreau is a powerful before picture his
journals contain records of the dates of
flowering and leaf out in Concord
Massachusetts the timing of flowering
and leaf out ecologists call this
phenology is tied to spring temperatures
most plants bloom earlier in warm years
and later in cool years and these small
phenological events can ripple out
across an ecosystem if flowering occurs
before pollinators are flying or if an
early leafing invasive species shades
out the later leaves of a native plant
there are consequences for reproduction
competition and food webs these
long-term datasets of leaf out and
flowering phenology like the rose
journals can tell us how plants respond
to changes in climate the Rose not
unusual for noticing seasonal changes or
recording phenology in his journal but
he has influential name recognition my
PhD advisor always refers to the town as
the rose Concord and he loves to use the
Thoreau connection to start
conversations with sirot you can talk
about climate change without polar bears
or icebergs his data is simple and local
and recognizable Thoreau it turns out
new my 19th century girlfriend
they were both residents of Thoreau’s
Concord in the 1840s and 1850s Thoreau
was or Annie was born while Thoreau was
a Harvard student and as a kid she used
to follow him through the fields and
woods of Concord on botanizing trips a
century and a half later I would find
myself following my adviser who was
following the rose notes through the
fields and woods of Concord once again
when I started graduate school I set out
to find the Thoreau of the north
expected that the archives at Acadia
National Park on Mount Desert Island
would be full of journals as detailed
and meticulous as the rose and in Acadia
I could ignore some of the development
pressures that plague studies in
Thoreau’s conquered because Acadia has
been a national park since 1916 in the
decades before 1916 Mount Desert Island
supported farming fishing granite
quarries sawmills
two groups of people summered on the
island the wealthy East Coast elites in
their lavish hotels and cottages and the
Wabanaki who had lived on the Maine
coast for thousands of years and now set
up summer encampments in the villages
annie was one of the summer cottage
people she was a schoolteacher in
Andover Massachusetts and in the 1880s
she and her husband built a house on the
island bone desert island is a little
over 100 square miles of granite ridges
glacially carved ponds and wetlands
rolling hills and rocky intertidal zones
it’s less than 1% of the land of the
state of Maine but it contains over half
of the natural plant communities on the
state in 1894 it supported 680 plant
species including 106 that are locally
extinct today we know this because a
group of college boys who bonded over
their shared interests in natural
history and documenting themselves left
behind a goldmine of historical records
these college boys called themselves the
Champlain society the society formed in
1880 in a Harvard dorm room with the
intent of spending the summer exploring
the natural history of Mount Desert
Island
they kept daily log books full of
entries like the Champlain Society flag
design their field excursions
epic poems describing their exploits
photographs of their campsite and
progress towards their goals in the
department’s of botany
ornithology geology in the winter they
convened dinner parties complete with
letterpress printed menus at which the
department’s presented annual reports
and made plans for the next summer
membership lasted long after Harvard
graduation the last Champlain Society
logbook is from the summer of 1888 and
many of the boys grew up to own houses
on the island as adults their writing is
credited with spurring some of the first
conversations around conservation and a
national park on Mount Desert Island but
from my perspective they’re most
incredible contribution is creating a
botanist out of a pre-law student and
getting him to publish the floor of
Mount Desert Island Maine in 1894 Edward
loether brand the chair of the botanical
department was the lawyer botanist he
led the department’s efforts to compile
a complete list of every plant species
on the island in the Champlain Society
log books he appears as an earnest and
studious kid while the other Champlain
Boys row boats across Nome sound to meet
the young ladies at the fashionable
hotels ran stays behind to work on his
BOTS nicing mission Rand graduated from
Harvard College and then Harvard Law
School the society disbanded and yes he
continued to come back summer after
summer to boughten eyes on Mount Desert
Island and work on his book the
Champlain Society log books and the
Botanical Department reports are
littered with the names of other
scientists and hobbyists who studied the
islands plants and ferns and mosses and
orchids Rand worked with all of them I
copied down those names and searched the
archives hoping that one of these
collaborators would be record recorded
the dates of flowering or leaf out on
that desert island in the 19th century I
expected to find my dissertation my
thorough instead I found Annie Annie has
cited over 25 times in grants flora
she’s the source for a fern a moss for
orchids a crow berry a plantain a catnip
a skullcap a mint a Bellflower still
today there are pressed plants at
Harvard that she collected with Edward
Rand
I love thinking about this Annie was in
her 40s botanizing around this island
with a twenty-something Harvard boy
anny
discovered rhododendron road aura forma
Alba flora a white road aura typically a
road aura has deep purple petals with
indigo freckles it’s in the same family
as blueberries and Huckleberry’s and it
blooms before it Leafs out creating the
illusion of a plant engulfed in violet I
had never heard of a white road aura
before and so when I read about Inez I
hunted down her or barium specimen at
Harvard’s Grey herbarium in tight-knit
script she describes this flower pure
white was collected on the island in
1888 in 2013 I stumbled across a plant
with bright white petals in the middle
of a patch of standard-issue purple row
Dora the white road Dora sat in the
saddle between Cedar Swamp mountain and
Sargent mountain in Acadia National Park
it was my favorite spot that spring
capturing photographs of the whites of
Roe Dora made me feel a kinship with
Annie at the time I was struggling to
track down her field books or records
she wrote so meticulously about botany
and her magazine pieces that I was sure
she must have kept log books full of
detailed notes maybe even dates of
flowering but my searches came up empty
finding the white road Dora was like
finding a piece of Annie alive on the
island I haven’t seen it since the white
road Dora is apparently an ephemeral
phenomenon I’m telling the story of
Annie Sawyer downs because her field
books if they existed didn’t make it to
posterity there are no epic poems or
hand-drawn flags for her her
contributions are recorded in the scraps
of other stories
she’s a citation a specimen label a note
next to the description of her summer
cottage still standing in southwest
Harbor
I love Annie perhaps because she is half
shadow and it’s easy for me to project
this relationship between us I bought
knives where she botton eyes so we must
be soulmates Annie is who I would have
been if I had been born in the 1830s
instead of the 1980s
the end of the 19th century was an
interesting time in botany especially in
Maine Maine was still a bit of a
frontier there were new species to
discover but also railroads and
steamships to carry your specimens home
to Harvard and civilization the
Champlain Society represents an age of
amateur enthusiasm for Natural History
the society members all pursued careers
outside of science while on ironically
pledging their loyalty and their field
summers to the Society’s scientific
goals in the years after the society
disbanded efforts to professionalize the
natural sciences made this mix of non
science students on Natural History
excursions increasingly rare and since
it was the 19th century
professionalization meant flipping the
narrative to emphasize the masculinity
of botany flowers had an effeminate
reputation in Maine there’s good reason
for this among the most prolific and
most badass of 19th century botanist is
Kate furbish who explored the allagash
river in remote Aroostook County while
producing beautiful and detailed
watercolors of the plants of Maine
Edward Rand was remembered by his
colleagues as a capital tramper but
furbished his fieldwork makes rands time
on Mount Desert Island look like a trip
to the spa in 1881 furbish published a
record of her time botanizing in
Aroostook County
six years later science published a
short piece with the rhetorical title is
botany a suitable study for young men
their answer was of course yes it builds
mental discipline and promotes physical
activity with the subtext that it was
not suitable for young women the New
England Botanical Club assumed this
perspective when it formed in 1895 and
women were excluded from membership into
the 1960s but in the last year’s of the
19th century
Annie continued to write and botton eyes
in 1892 she publishes how I bought
knives in 1894 she was cited in the book
the orchids of New England in 1895 she
headlined a meeting of the
Mountain Club I loved Annie because she
got just enough of herself into the
history books right in science and the
New England Botanical Club were erecting
there no girls allowed signs I love how
she writes about botany and how the
stories of her that survive paint the
portrait of a capable and practical
botanist and I really love knowing that
in the summers when the Champlain
Society was setting off fireworks at
their campsite and hosting canoe races
amongst themselves and he was on the
island to the study presence of a
middle-aged woman who wore shoes of a
sensible thickness and packed a
pocketknife
[Applause]
yeah so I have a follow-up question
so did Annie make it into your
dissertation unfortunately she didn’t I
never found any records that she had
kept so while I used all of Edward rands
on the floor of Mount Desert Island to
look at how plant communities had
changed over time so I could say these
things became more abundant these things
disappeared I couldn’t really look at
how changes in flowering time had
happened on the island but recording
phonology is back in fashion and so
everyone can get the National phenology
networks app on their phone and make
their own records just like Thoreau and
like Annie probably did and health
ecologists like me to track changes in
tidings of flowering and leaf out
[Applause]
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