THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED

—by Marilyn Davis

Robert Mohlenbrock's back yard runs coast to coast, and he knows its hills and valleys like the back of his hand.

A professor emeritus of botany, Mohlenbrock has made it his life's work to find out everything he can about North American plants and the places they grow—and then to tell the rest of us. At age 74, he is on the road with his wife, Beverly, about six months out of every year, driving their jam-packed red Town & Country van from site to site, scouting out the beautiful, the intriguing, and the rare. Yet even though he's seen the most spectacular scenery and the most unusual vegetation this continent has to offer, one of his favorite sights remains the little blue-eyed Marys that carpet the forest floor of Giant City State Park every April, just a few miles south of his Carbondale home.

An old-fashioned naturalist, Mohlenbrock specializes in systematics (the classification of organisms and how they're related) and floristics (documenting exactly what plants are present in a given area and what species make up plant communities). He's written more than 50 books, including guides to North American wildflowers and trees. He's contributed hundreds of articles to scientific journals and the popular press. Readers of Natural History magazine have been treated to his "This Land" columns for more than 20 years and constitute an unofficial nationwide fan club.

Mohlenbrock usually juggles several book projects at once. The University of California Press has just brought out his three-volume set of guides to the national forests of the United States. SIU Press is publishing a four-volume series of his detailing all wetland plants of the Midwest. And he's continuing work on a massive series, also with SIU Press, called The Illustrated Flora of Illinois—the first attempt to describe and illustrate every plant species growing wild in a particular state. Since 1960, sixteen volumes have been published of a projected 24, with updated editions already produced for some.

This endeavor is like taking a still shot of a moving target. "We add about 25 species a year in Illinois," Mohlenbrock says—both native and non-native species newly documented in the state. For example, biologists are still finding previously unsuspected plant species in the remote hollows of the Shawnee National Forest. But such finds are outnumbered 4-to-1 by non-native species extending their range.

"Most of the new plants we're finding have come in along roadsides," he says. "Especially around the Chicago area, they're always finding new kinds of weeds popping up."

Mohlenbrock's love of national forests had its impetus in the desire to get up close and personal with a sequoia. In 1960, he and his family traveled to Sequoia National Park for their first opportunity to see the giants of the plant kingdom. But the park was so crowded that tourists had to be bused in to famous Mariposa Grove. "I wanted to go up and hug one of these trees," he recalls, "but before I had the chance, everyone was herded back on the bus."

Irked, he consulted his map of the neighboring Sierra National Forest, which indicated something called Nelder Grove at the end of a 20-mile dirt road. It turned out to be an equally stunning group of sequoias. "It was the most breathtaking thing I'd ever seen," Mohlenbrock says, "and we were the only ones there the whole day."

From then on, family vacations took the roads less traveled by. Mohlenbrock was on a mission not only to find solitude in the uncrowded national forests, but also to seek out natural areas with especially interesting plants, animals, and geological formations. "We found most of these areas ourselves," he says. "The Forest Service themselves didn't know what they had right under their noses."

Mohlenbrock wrote about these places, of course, eventually publishing Field Guide to U.S. National Forests: Enchanted Lands for Hikers and Campers (Congdon & Weed, 1984). That book caught the attention of the editor of Natural History magazine, who invited Mohlenbrock to write "This Land," a monthly column about some of his favorite forest areas.

"The idea was that each site, besides being pretty, had an interesting biological, geological, or historical story to tell," Mohlenbrock says. By and by he was allowed a broader canvas: any publicly accessible site is fair game for him to spotlight. To date he has contributed more than 200 columns. The saga came full circle when the University of California Press asked him to write a comprehensive set of field guides to the forests that would also reprint many of these popular pieces.

When Mohlenbrock began exploring the national forests, the U.S. Forest Service's chief emphasis was still timber production. Over the years he saw the growth of the conservation ethic within the Forest Service, with many more areas now set aside as preserves. By drawing attention to special areas within the forests, he says, "I like to think that a lot of what I've done has helped preservation efforts."

Rare and imperiled plants are a particular interest of Mohlenbrock's. From his earliest teaching days, before endangered species were a popular concern, he kept records of the rarest plants in every state. In 1983 he published the first and, thus far, only comprehensive book on endangered plants in the United States. Called Where Have All the Wildflowers Gone? (Macmillan), it described 200 "at-risk" species. Some of these may always have been comparatively rare, he says, but at least half had once been more abundant.

The head of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission subsequently asked Mohlenbrock to head up a North American Plant Specialist Group. The group met for more than a decade and issued "red lists" to draw attention to plants in danger of extinction. But the experience was ultimately discouraging, Mohlenbrock says, because it was hard to get other conservation groups to share information.

Still, he maintains, the outlook for plants in the United States is not dire. Most of the species featured in his book "are still hanging on," he says. "I've noticed that some of these are making a comeback."

In part, he says, that's due to the fact that "plants are very resilient." But he also credits the Endangered Species Act, which drove the creation of state commissions to study and protect endangered species, and groups like The Nature Conservancy, which are preserving habitat and carrying out species reintroduction programs.

Indeed, Mohlenbrock served for 10 years on the board of directors of the Center for Plant Conservation, a network of U.S. botanical institutions with the common goal of preventing the extinction of native flora. The center, headquartered at the Missouri Botanical Garden (where Mohlenbrock is a research associate), maintains the National Collection of Endangered Plants, which provides material for restoration efforts.

Thanks to a remarkable biology teacher who took students on field trips in her spare time, Mohlenbrock's love of plants took root when he was a junior at Murphysboro (Ill.) High School. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in botany from SIU, then his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis.

He returned to Southern Illinois as an instructor in the Botany Department (now the Plant Biology Department). Within nine years he worked his way up to full professor. He chaired the department for 16 years (1964-79), was made a Distinguished Professor in 1984, and was named SIUC's Outstanding Scholar for 1988. He directed the work of 90 graduate students, who have gone on to hold key agency positions and professorships all across the country. One, in fact, is now the head botanist for the U.S. Forest Service.

In 1990 Mohlenbrock retired from SIUC, but not from teaching. Besides writing books and his Natural History column, he leads plant identification courses across the country for the Wetland Training Institute. Environmental regulations require that any time a wetland is destroyed to make room for construction, another wetland must be created or enlarged to compensate. Thus government personnel and private consultants need to be able to determine where wetlands exist; plant identification helps greatly with that.

Talking with Mohlenbrock and browsing through his books, one grows convinced that he's acquainted with every back road in the country. He certainly has driven every back road in Southern Illinois, he says. He hasn't tackled every trail in the nation, but he's hiked hundreds of them, including every trail described at any length in his national forest field guides.

His books are family affairs. Beverly helps with notes and types manuscripts; their son Mark has done illustrations for some of the volumes; their daughter, Wendy, now prepares the extensive indexes; their other son Trent, who owns a nursery, has contributed maps. All have explored the outdoors with him.

Even as a high schooler, Mohlenbrock wrote pieces on botany for local newspapers. At the start of his academic career he made a very deliberate decision to write for both scholars and the general public.

"I didn't want to keep all these finds just within the scientific community—I wanted the whole world to know about them," he says.

As ambitious as ever, Mohlenbrock gets frustrated that he can no longer stay up writing until midnight. Nonetheless, he plans to keep on packing up the van, hitting the trail, and describing what he sees.

"I still get as excited about doing it now as I did when I first started," he says.

Sidebar: Some of Bob Mohlenbrock's "Don't-Miss" Spots