What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/913321
FEATURE 8 WHAT'S UP! DECEMBER 10-16, 2017 The Art Of Science Book brings together two unique efforts in education BECCA MARTIN-BROWN NWA Democrat-Gazette F or nigh onto 30 years, Kent Bonar traversed the hills and valleys of Northwest Arkansas carrying a tome the size of an Oxford English Dictionary. It wasn't even his book, although it did have its roots at the University of Arkansas, but it became a journal of his experiences in the woods and all the flora and many of the fauna the naturalist saw there. Now, thanks to the University of Arkansas Press, the Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies and the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, the original "Atlas and Annotated List of the Vascular Plants of Arkansas" by University of Arkansas botanist Edwin B. Smith has been reprinted with some 3,500 of Bonar's drawings. Now titled "An Arkansas Florilegium," it is, says Bob Cochran, a professor of English and folklore, a record of two "monumental undertakings by two Arkansas characters." And "Arkansas Character" is not coincidentally the name of the series it's published in at University Press. "Character," says Cochran, means both to exhibit integrity and to be something of an odd duck, and it's an appropriate description of both men. Edwin Smith, who died in January, was a professor of botany and curator of the Arkansas Herbarium at the University of Arkansas for 32 years. Cochran describes "The Atlas and Annotated List of the Vascular Plants of Arkansas," released in 1978, as the seminal survey of the state's flora and on Smith's part, a "solitary, heroic endeavor" that included the book being literally self- published on a mimeograph machine — although on very good paper, he points out. It was, he explains, never intended to be a coffee table book. An entry for Trifolium vesiculosum, for example, reads: "This species has apparently recently been introduced in cultivation in Arkansas and is escaping. It was reported as new to the United States in 1969 (in Louisiana and Mississippi), new to Alabama in 1970, and new to Oklahoma in 1974." Only a diligent reader would get beyond "arrow-leaf clover." Bonar was that diligent reader and more. Raised in Johnson County, Mo. — the Warrensburg area — he spent most of his childhood with his grandparents, "out squirrel hunting when I was barely walking" with one grandfather and learning the difference between weeds and vegetables in the garden with the other. In addition to studying the ways of game animals, Bonar was taught how to forage in the woods, which plants were edible and which were delicacies. By junior high, he was picking up field guides in bookstores when he could, and after high school, he enrolled at the University of Missouri. His adviser, he remembers with some awe, was the son-in-law of American author, philosopher and environmentalist Aldo Leopold, and he understood Bonar's desire to "get an education, not just a degree." "But I did set a 35-year curve [for grades] in ornithology," he says proudly. Bonar left school behind when he was offered a job as a naturalist in the Arkansas park system about the time the Vietnam War was winding to a close. He says the state really didn't know what a naturalist was supposed to do, so he set Photo courtesy Kelly Mulhollan Kent Bonar lives in rural Newton County with a passel of dogs and cats, a well for water, a solar charger for his radio and his passion for the outdoors. In his lap is the book on Arkansas flora he illustrated over the course of some 30 years.