A 120-year-old book connects us with Alabama’s past and future

A hidden text in an old book reminds us of why we’re here.

It’s a wonder that a state with so much biodiversity isn’t also considered a leader in the study of that diversity.

But oddly, in the early 20th century, it was — in large measure because of the efforts of a German-born amateur botanist, Charles Mohr. In the 1850s, after travels through Europe, New England, California, Mexico and a number of tropical countries, Mohr opened up a pharmacy in Mobile. A pharmacist in those days wasn’t so much a pill pusher, but a compounder of herbs whose success often rested on a knowledge of local plants. Mohr took that plant knowledge to a new level, and produced what has to be considered the first great comprehensive state botany, which became a model for botanists in other states.

Mohr’s Plant Life of Alabama, published in 1901, is now a treasure for botanists studying the Southeast. Mohr’s work was so revered that his name was attached to many Southeastern species – I remember him every time I see the distinctive moon-yellow flowers of Silphium mohrii, a species almost entirely restricted to northeast Alabama.

We’ve discovered many species since Mohr first published that book, but many of us still carefully sift through our fragile old copies, looking to find Mohr’s astute observations about plant communities in Alabama–sometimes, sadly, the last observations made before those communities were obliterated. The book has never been “digitized” to my knowledge, and even if it were, there’s something about holding an old copy of Plant Life that is almost as rare and exciting as finding Mohr’s rosinweed in full bloom.

And that’s why Jackie Palmer’s recent gift of Plant Life of Alabama is so special to us.

Books have a life and history. Not just the text. But the pages themselves, the worn cover, the grease marks of having been thumbed through, the first owner’s name scribbled proudly on the opening pages, the marginalia of many minds making notes about what they’ve read.

So there’s something that can be read in the bindings of a book that can’t be read on the internet. And the more owners and readers who handle the book, the more likely it is that the book will take on new meaning. It’s a ghost text that much-handled books have.

That’s one of the exciting and challenging things about being gifted much of E.O. Wilson’s natural history library – thanks to Ed’s long-time assistant Kathleen Horton. Many of those books were so rare when first printed, they are precious resources for us even if they had never been opened. But the real history of that collection lives in who used it, who made notes, who drew the tiny perfect pictures of ants, who sent the books and who received them.

Even as we begin to develop our own server to store electronically all the data and all the studies we are producing, we can’t seem to free ourselves from the science of old books. And fortunately for us, the folks at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, North Carolina, and Jackie Palmer in particular, added significantly to our collection.

The copy of Plant Life of Alabama that Jackie gave us was as clean and undamaged as a 120-year-old book could be. But as with so many of E.O. Wilson’s books, there was a ghost text hidden in the end papers: “HAGleason Nov. 14, 1903.” Shortly after this book was first published, one of the most famous botanists in North America, Henry Allan Gleason, carefully inscribed his name just inside the cover. That’s some of the best evidence we have that Alabama’s first botany influenced the development of Gleason and Cronquist’s Manual of Vascular Plants of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada, which became the most influential North American botany of the mid-20th century.

Gleason’s legacy was broader than the Vascular Plants volume. He was director of the New York Botanical Gardens, and in many ways the E.O. Wilson of his day, attempting to rethink unfounded notions about how ecosystems assemble and fall apart. His concepts are still controversial, but they marked an important turning point, as people began to recognize that ecosystems weren’t monolithic and unchanging, but often frequently changing associations of species whose fates could be independent of the systems they were found in. That’s an argument that our founding scientists, UCLA’s Stephen Hubbell and Ed Wilson, could spend many days debating.

Understanding that relationship between species and ecosystems is still a perplexing problem, and one we’re deeply involved with at Paint Rock. It’s as if Gleason’s inscription in Plant Life of Alabama is a hand reaching out to us from the past, guiding our research on the future of forests.

City Lights bookstore and Jackie Palmer also presented us with another Alabama book treasure. This copy of Birds of Alabama was owned by Frank Hahn, who lived on the Mississippi and Alabama border, and whose included notes on bird sightings in the area offer another ghost text that we’ll be studying.