ON THE POPULARIZATION OF BOTANY 463 



could ask — a geneticist who sees plant life in terms of inheritance, evolution, 

 hybridity, and all the social implications that follow from plant breeding 

 and plant introduction. He is yeasty with ideas, highly important ones, and 

 sometimes highly disturbing to the conventionally minded botanist. He is 

 even interested in the weeds of city alleys — indeed I should have said espe- 

 cially interested. He is more fascinated still by the flora of the farmyard 

 manure pile. And (hold your hats, we're going around a curve) he states 

 that most botanists cannot even name some of our commonest garden flowers 

 correctly, for the reason that the commoner the plant the less botanists know 

 about it: "Bring back a collection of rare little alpines from the Continental 

 Divide. There will be a score of experts who can name them for you . . . pick 

 one of the modern bearded irises from your own flower garden and . . . two 

 out of three botanists will probably tell you that your plant belongs to Iris 

 germanka, which it certainly does not. . . ." If by this time the systematic 

 botanist is nettled by Anderson, that is because he is interested in nettles both 

 botanical and figurative. 



I am not disturbed by the fact that Anderson's organization is free-wheel- 

 ing, or his presentation, like champagne, sends bubbles up the nose. My only 

 complaint is that Anderson doesn't write more books. In fact I find this 

 quite infuriating in him. On the other hand, my friend the author of the fern 

 guide often produces a little book; his organization is always impeccable; 

 he never misses his target because he is shooting at point-blank range. Ander- 

 son, with his sights elevated very high, might conceivably miss his target some 

 day, but he would be bound to hit something beyond the horizon, even if it 

 were nothing but the complacency of my own ignorance. 



One of the greatest challenges to a popularizer of botany is to see how well 

 his job can be performed by somebody who is not a botanist. I am thinking 

 in particular of the description, in W. H. Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago, 

 of the great "thistle years" on the Argentine pampas. Here is a common weed, 

 of European origin, the cardoon thistle Cynara cardunculus. And see what 

 Hudson, an ornithologist, does with the mounting horror of the thistle, when 

 you could hear the harsh leaves crackling as in their growth they freed them- 

 selves from their cramped position with a jerk; when a gaucho on horseback 

 could barely see over the tops of the thistle; when the thistles crowded to 

 the windows of the houses like a sleeping-beauty wood and women feared to 

 be left alone ; when fire raged through the dead stalks completing the apocalyp- 

 tic curse. 



In America, surely, we have vegetation quite as interesting as the cardoon. 

 Yet where is the botanist who writes the full story of sagebrush, bluegrass, 

 sawgrass, buffalo-grass, gramagrass, greasewood, creosote-bush, longleaf pine, 

 with all their historic and social as well as ecological and botanical implica- 

 tions? One of my friends, a deeply respected prairie-states ecologist, studied 

 the ecological and social aspects of some of these, writing with great earnest- 



