From Dust to Discovery: The Birth of Desert Botanist Forrest Shreve
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
July 8, 1878
On this day, dear readers, the American botanist Forrest Shreve was born, a man whose passion for the arid and seemingly inhospitable would forever change how we understand our desert landscapes.
We owe such a debt of gratitude to Shreve, dear readers—though I daresay most garden enthusiasts wandering among their pampered roses have never uttered his name.
He was THE preeminent botanist of North American deserts during the first half of the Twentieth Century, cataloguing and defining what most considered barren wasteland with the precision and dedication of a devoted lover.
Shreve worked out of a laboratory in Tucson, Arizona. The lab was ideally situated for Shreve's field research of the western United States and northern Mexico.
Shreve relished telling the origin story of his lab with a particular gleam in his eye:
"Of course you are familiar with the story of Andrew Carnegie," he began, "the immigrant boy who became one of America's richest steel magnates and who left a fortune 'to encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner investigation, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind.'"
Before he died, Carnegie had established an institution that divided its scientific investigations into twelve departments in widely separated parts of the country. The Desert Laboratory became one of the outposts of the Division of Plant Biology. The total Carnegie benefaction totaled about $25,000,000—a sum that would make even the wealthiest garden patron catch their breath.
In July of 1908, Shreve ascended the Santa Catalina Mountains for the very first time. His party rode on horses to climb the 6,000 feet from Mount Lemmon's desert base to the summit which is 9,100 feet above sea level—a journey one imagines was considerably less comfortable than our afternoon strolls through cultivated gardens.
During that climb, Shreve noticed what he called "a continually shifting panorama of vegetation".
Shreve's astuteness helped him realize the most amazing aspect of desert mountains: changes in vegetation are compressed into a few thousand feet of elevation—a veritable world tour of plant communities in the span of a day's journey!
Starting with desert scrub (those fascinating spiny survivors), then grassland (waving like a sea in the mountain winds), then oak woodland (with their ancient, gnarled forms)... and followed by pine-oak woodland and forest, then pink forest, montane fir forest, and finally subalpine forest—nature's own demonstration of adaptation and survival.
Shreve's mastery of the North American Desert allowed him to describe and define, with precision, the four distinct desert regions of the United States. While we gardeners fuss over our delicate specimens, these hardy desert plants thrived under Shreve's scientific gaze, revealing their secrets to one who took the time to truly see them.
Today, each year, in Shreve's honor, the Forrest Shreve Student Research Award ($1000-2000) is given to support the ongoing research of the hot deserts of North America.
One wonders what Shreve would make of our current climate concerns, and how his intimate knowledge of desert adaptation might serve us now.
For those of us who tremble at the sight of a wilting hydrangea, perhaps there is wisdom to be found in Shreve's beloved desert plants—masters of survival in the most trying conditions, holders of secrets we've only begun to understand.
