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Flower Power

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Rogers was bent on snagging a Lasiosiphon ambondrombensis, an elusive tubular yellow flower with shiny silver leaves that hadn't been collected in about 75 years. When he and two Malagasy scientists arrived at the base of the mountain where the plant grew, they were told by local residents the peak was sacred. "This was supposedly where dead people's spirits lived," Rogers explains. "My counterparts wanted to drink rum and smoke cigars to scare away the spirits."

Rogers' crew was forced to hire a "spiritual guide," a spindly elder dressed in multicolored rags who brought his thirtysomething son, the heir-apparent-in-training. The guide promised safety from the spirits in exchange for performing various rites of passage. As night fell, the elder made the group stop; arriving at the mountain in the dark would anger the spirits, he warned. For dinner, the scientists sacrificed a chicken, sprinkled its blood over a makeshift shrine and overdosed on rum to ward off dreams of being snatched by ghosts.

Rogers played along, even on the following day, when the guide suddenly decided no one could relieve himself on nature's carpet. "You had to put it in this piece of bamboo he chopped open," Rogers recounts.

"I thought it was total malarkey. I don't believe in superstition," he adds. "But it was all kind of fun. And you have to respect their beliefs."

That is, if you want to collect those green trophies. They tower and crouch at eye-level and underfoot, and sometimes tickle an earlobe. They can grow in tandem and in trees. The collector must work meticulously, with the exactness of a surgeon. For each plant extracted, a number is recorded in a notebook along with detailed observations of the plant and its habitat. It must be done neatly, because other botanists might consult the field book years later. "A historical document," Rogers calls it.

The collector presses the plants into sheets of newspaper, bags the samples and douses them with an alcohol-water mixture. Eventually he dries the specimen stacks wherever he can -- atop the oven of a local baker or perhaps a kerosene refrigerator. Treated this way, the flattened "mummies," as one botanist calls them, can last forever; they are sent to the collector's home herbarium, where the identification work begins.

Rogers talks plants the way a quarterback talks passes, yet as he looks around the botanical garden's research division -- unable to find another young scientist like himself devoted to slogging through taxonomy -- he wonders if this is really his dream job. "The question is: Can I make a living at it? Can I have a family?"

Ph.D.-level botanists at the Missouri Botanical Garden aren't taking home celebrity salaries; the annual pay ranges between $40,000 and $60,000.

That's a key reason why grizzled veterans like Tom Croat worry they're a dying breed, as endangered as ashy dogweeds. Croat and his older cohorts are seeing a growing number of young botanists becoming far more enamored with high-tech molecular studies using computers than with microscopes and human hands. Grumbles Croat: "They don't even know what the damn thing is they're looking at!"

All day long, taxonomist Ron Liesner unpacks boxes of specimens and labels them. "I'm 60, and there's no way I can finish the general work that needs to be done," he says. "There's so much sorting to be done, so many families that need to be determined. When I was younger, I'd wonder what family I'd specialize in when I finished the general work. It never happened."

"I don't know what'll happen when I retire. It takes a long time to become a generalist. I can take these and put families on all of them at a glance. And I don't see a young person who's doing that."

Meanwhile, with all the material Croat's already amassed, he says he could work another 100 years. "There's really no end to it. And, of course, the whole thing comes crashing down when I die."

Almost 900 scientists are working on one of the most massive botanical undertakings in history. It is called the Flora of North America project -- an ambitious mission, say its organizers, that will serve as a physical environmental check-up for the continent.

For 22 years this dogged brigade of botanists from all over the world has been racing to find, name and record in 30 volumes an entire continent's -- plus Greenland's -- vegetative history. It is a staggering job, and the Missouri Botanical Garden is the command center for the encyclopedia's editorial battalion.

So many questions to be answered. What flowered here once? What weeds invaded? What's left? What may it tell us about global warming? What may it say about the origins of life? The scientists comb through old pressed flowers and the crinkled field books of their predecessors in addition to drawing from their own observations and research. Then they pen texts on each plant. More than 20,000 plants, growing across almost 8.3 million square miles -- from the Florida Keys in the south to northernmost regions of Canada, from Greenland in the east to Attu Island in the west -- are included. The botanists are exploring arctic tundra, boreal forest, mixed-grass prairie, grassland, conifer forests and beyond.

Though their funding has come in fits and starts over the years, the botanists remain obsessed by their quest to preserve knowledge. All but a handful work for free.

In a sense, it all began 175 years ago when John Torrey and Asa Gray, two of the nation's earliest professional botanists, first attempted a continental compendium of plant life but never finished. A second incarnation of the North American flora project sprouted in the late 1960s, when a group of scientists, including Missouri Botanical Garden director Peter Raven, launched a similar endeavor but lost funding before getting anything printed.

This latest effort sprang up in 1983, when St. Louis became headquarters for the encyclopedia. It took the botanists five years just to secure minimal funding, enough to cover salaries for a handful of layout staff and illustrators. Participating institutions, including the St. Louis garden, the Botanical Research Institute of Texas and the Université de Montréal, agreed to donate office space and technical support.

Over the past decade, the federal government has shown little commitment to the project, chipping in less than $1 million.

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