You’ve been studying wildflowers for more than thirty years. What was the catalyst—the magic moment—that brought you to appreciate them in the first place?
I can remember that moment very well. I was ten years old, and my family had moved into an old house on the very edge of Oklahoma City. Always curious and never afraid, I started exploring the new neighborhood. Across the street was a flower I’d never seen before and had no name for. I asked everyone in the neighborhood for a name, and none of them knew, and no one was interested in finding out. There was simply no way known to that working-class community to get such information.
So, I went to the Carnegie Library, about a mile away, and asked the librarian. Sad to say, she told me to ”go back to the children’s section and quit bothering me.” Baffled, I decided to make my own list and give them names.
I tried drawing pictures of the flowers and putting my made-up names on them, but it wasn’t like having the flowers. I melted paraffin on the kitchen stove and dipped them in it. What a mess! I got gooey spinach. But I never thought of drying and pressing them—how I wish I had!
Three years later, in junior high school, I found a science teacher who encouraged my interest in wild things, but she was not trained in botany and could not help with many of the names. That interest lay latent until Dr. Doyle McCoy published the first edition of his Roadside Flowers of Oklahoma while I was in high school. Soon I could find the “real” names of those local plants I’d given such fanciful names to.
But nobody I ever met in Oklahoma City really cared about wildflowers, and it remained a private matter while I started college and then went to work at Tinker Air Force Base, married, and had children.
What other plants and animals are you especially interested in?
I’ve been a member of the Audubon Society since I moved to Norman in 1975. They were obsessed with birds, but tolerant of my interest in the plants, and they had field trips! Someone, at last, who would be companions on explorations into wild places. Always, I took the McCoy books with me on those trips. Now, I am more interested in insects, and that is becoming more possible since there are, at last, a few good picture guides for them. Insects and flowers, of course, go together.
You not only wrote the text for this guide to Oklahoma’s wildflowers, but you took the photographs. How did you come to write your guide? What’s the main thing that you hope to accomplish with its publication?
I took the pictures because they were the best way I knew to preserve the appearance of the flowers. Getting a good macro camera in 1975 made the production of color slides fun and easy. And my new husband loved to go camping in Colorado during the hottest two weeks every year in Oklahoma. A whole new range of plants to explore! I have pictures of almost every wildflower that grows above 8,000 feet in Conejos County, Colorado.
I started giving slide programs to the Audubon society and local schools. After the Oklahoma Native Plant Society was organized, I became a fixture at their gatherings, and soon I was giving programs at least weekly. I was always concerned with the accuracy of identification, and when an evening class in plant identification was offered at the University of Oklahoma one year, I was finally able to make my own identifications. That class was taught by Dr James Estes, who became my mentor and has stuck by me all the years since.
I did not intend to write a book, but after my 75th birthday, the strain of all that travelling to do slide shows was beginning to tell on me. Then I met a young man who had beautiful slides but needed help with their names. All he wanted was the names, and he published online. I offered to write the text for him if he’d allow me to use his pictures. Those were digital pictures. We went to the OU Press, the only one I knew about, and were encouraged to go ahead.
Then my photographer friend backed out, absolutely refused to go on with the project, and recalled all his pictures. By that time, I had text for 400 plants already written. The OU Press wanted slides, anyway, and I pulled the best ones I had and sent them in. Nothing ever came of it, and years later, I went over there and took my material home. Put it under the guest bed and tried to forget about it.
I wanted to get a book out for two reasons: Dr. McCoy had died, and his books were out of print and badly out of date. Taxonomy has come a long way since the 1950s, and so has photography. New members of the native plant society had nothing to get started with. My co-workers on the Flora of Oklahoma project are all botany professors. They have their hands full teaching their students how to determine their own names. That’s a process that I enjoy, but it is time-consuming and also requires a research library and a good microscope. Someone needed to get busy and write a new one guide.
How long have you been photographing plants? What are the particular challenges of being a botanical photographer?
I got a 35mm camera with a 1:1 macro lens in 1975 and immediately started photographing every flower I could find. My children were all grown then, and it made a good hobby. I just wanted the pictures and had no plan for using them.
To get usable pictures of flowers, you have to get down to their level. Many of my friends in the Native Plant Society have their own pictures of me, groveling in the gravel while making a close-up of a tiny wildflower. I have waded in swamps, using chest waders, crawled through underbrush, defied traffic while photographing along the highways, and met not a few curious wild and domestic animals. I’m not afraid of snakes, and I have accumulated quite a few tick and chigger bites but no snakebites. Maybe not being afraid of them helps.
When I first started, most rural landowners were not hostile. That has changed in recent years as trust between people has deteriorated. I do try to get permission to enter private land. But the best resource for me was the Nature Conservancy. I became involved with them when the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve was being negotiated, and I have had help from TNC workers in gaining access to those precious places.
Tell us about your work with the Flora of Oklahoma project and the Bebb Herbarium.
That came out of the four short courses I took at OU while still working full-time. Dr. Estes was very encouraging about my plant obsession and asked me to come in and work with him when I could do day-time work. So, the week after my retirement in January 1988, there I was.
Dr. Estes gave me a cabinet and a microscope to use while I was in the herbarium and assigned a graduate student to teach me what I needed to know. The student, Staria Vanderpool, was just wonderful: patient and kind and very knowledgeable. I worked only one day a week, so was possibly not too much of a drain on her patience. She stuck by me until she got her Ph.D., then went on to teach botany at the University of Arkansas. By that time, I was fairly capable of doing the work.
I take plant specimens that have been pressed, dried, and donated to the herbarium by people doing field work all over the state. Then I use the standard methods of determining the names to assure that they are properly labeled and placed in the collections. It is a never-ending job, and it never gets old. I’m as enthralled by this work as I was on the first day.
After the Flora of Oklahoma project was established by Dr. Estes and Dr. Tyrl, they recruited a few others to help. It is an enormous task and has been occupying a good bit of my life since I was granted entry to it during its third year. When it came time for me to contribute a family description, nobody who was technically qualified was available to do the Cyperaceae (sedges). When I was asked to do the research and become able to do them, I jumped at the chance. I spent the next four years doing field work on sedges, collecting them all over the state, making the specimens, photographing the plants, and determining the names. During this time, the preliminary work was being done for the Flora of North America, and I corresponded with the sedge authors for that work, too.
Never have I been refused by a “real” botanist when I asked for help. They are the most helpful, forgiving, and kind people I’ve ever known. I still do my one-day-a week “job” (I’ve never been paid or wanted to be) and am now fully integrated into the business of authoring the Flora of Oklahoma.
Tell us about the Oklahoma Native Plant Society.
The ONPS was organized in 1988, but I was about 8 months too late to become a charter member. I attended the first annual meeting in 1989, at a state park, and have been involved with it ever since. What the ONPS offers its members is a quarterly newsletter, three or more state-wide meetings every year, and three local chapters with their own, mostly monthly meetings and lots of field trips.
Some of the original members were also botany professors, and the organization was shaped by Paul Buck of Tulsa University, several Tulsa garden club members, and Jim Norman, an amateur botanist and ardent birder from Muskogee. They led awesome field trips.
Soon we had a local chapter which met in the Myriad Gardens arboretum in Oklahoma City. After a while, I was leading my own field trips to the places I’d found while photographing the flowers.
I was president of the state organization from 2000 to 2002, after writing and distributing the newsletter, called “The Gaillardia,” for several years. Now, I’m just enjoying my retirement from official duties, but I try to attend all the meetings.
What has changed in the outdoor world since your first days of trying to learn about it and protect it? What’s better, what’s worse?
“What’s better” is the Internet, which makes information that is both more accessible and less reliable easier to get. Also, digital photography, that makes taking good pictures easier and more affordable. I don’t even want to think about what those boxes of slides cost me to create!
“What’s worse” is access to wild places. Vigorous efforts on the part of a few officials and the Native Plant Society to reduce the obsessive overmowing of highway margins have totally failed. It seems that political patronage of those jobs precludes eliminating any of them. Also, private property is much less accessible than it was 30 years ago. Rural property owners are wary of strangers wandering through their land and with some justification. (I’m a rural property owner, too). If it were not for the Nature Conservancy, there would be little access to the places that are still “natural.” State arks are so overused that they are about as full of wildlife as a school playground.
What advice would you give to beginning naturalists?
Get involved in the Audubon Society, the Native Plant Society, and your nearest university. All of them will use willing amateur help after they learn that they can trust you to take the work seriously. Don’t be afraid of getting your shoes muddy: the best places are often the wettest ones.
What are your favorite natural areas in Oklahoma and surrounding states? What areas do you return to constantly, and what’s your favorite newly visited area?
Well, the Nature Conservancy let me, with a friend who was a Ph.D. botanist, make the official inventory of the Pontotoc Ridge Preserve in south-central Oklahoma, and having worked it almost weekly during two growing seasons, it’s become one of my favorite places in the world.
Nearby, the Oklahoma Wildlife Department maintains a “preserve” that is actually a public hunting area. The Lexington Wildlife Area has become like a second home for me, as it is only about 5 miles away, and they let me in except during deer-hunting season, when it’s too dangerous. That is in the winter, so I get the whole growing season to myself.
Now that I’m a bit challenged in the mobility department, I’m not going out to explore new places much. My favorite place to visit since finishing the work at Pontotoc Ridge has been Black Mesa State Park in the far end of the Oklahoma Panhandle.
Patricia Folley, The Guide to Oklahoma Wildflowers
