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John Muir seemed to intuit that there was something special about plants whether winged, feather-downed, hooked, spiked or fruited. On a torn note he described his sensibility: “Seeds. Nature, one may fancy, amused at her own inventions. Nature’s purpose seen strikingly in seeds and buds, plans of another year, of thousands of years, wrapped up in them. Manner of travel, dispersal obvious and interesting, wet with dew or rain, sun shining through them as they shoot glad and blithesome into the welcoming sky in immortal health.”

Muir began his formal study of plants while a student at the University of Wisconsin, where he came under the spell of a locust tree, a legume, and Alphonso Wood’s Classbook of Botany. His desire to study botany led him to the University of the Wilderness, and, in 1864 in Ontario, Canada, he saw for the very first time the Calypso borealis. Never before had he seen a plant so full of life. Returning to the United States, having spent 24 months in Canada, Muir spent a restless period of about thirteen months in Indianapolis. The near loss of his eyesight in an industrial accident precipitated thoughts that led him to set aside his study of the inventions of humanity to study the inventions of God. More than anything else, Muir wanted to keep his eyes focused on the study of God’s beauty and love, visible in the wonder of the plant kingdom. He would live, he wrote, “only to entice others to look at Nature’s loveliness.

Doomed by restless inquiry and loosened, he thought, from common affairs, Muir began a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867. Meeting strange plants the further south he walked, he noted: ”They tell us that plants are perishable, soulless creatures, that only man is immortal, but this is something that we know very nearly nothing about.” In January, 1868, Muir boarded passage to Cuba and inquired about a ship headed for Columbia where he planned to travel to the headwaters of the Orinoco, then south to the Amazon. Plagued with malaria, contracted while traveling through Florida, and with limited funds, he turned to New York to go west to California and Yosemite Valley, a place he would call home for the next seven years. “Fate and Flowers” carried Muir to California, and he waded into the San Joaquin Valley through a sea of golden and purple blooms and then in Yosemite, where a sense of freedom prevailed as he settled in among the forests and the poetry of glacial ice.

In 1879 Muir ventured north to Alaska. He would visit the far north a total of seven times, and his journeys were, he said, irresistable. He celebrated Alaska’s noble glaciers, flora, and forest groves. It was during his third excursion with the Corwin, in 1881, that he undertook the most significant reconnaissance of plants in the far north. Alaska, for Muir, was a wealth of the extremes of nature, and there his imagination was excited, his loyalty to wilderness deepened, and his sympathy for nature expanded.

It is hard to find a page of Muir’s writing that does not describe a flower, plant or tree. His sketches of flora fill the pages of his journals. The plants he collected, and he collected more plants than anything else, are included in herbaria across the United States. At heart Muir remained a botanist throughout his life, setting out to find plant friends “in all their perfection of purity and spirituality,” to find the trees that waved and the flowers that bloomed, and to seek “every word of leaf and snowflake and particle of dew” in which resided the beauty that he trusted. Considered one of the earliest plant ecologists and a purveyor of biodiversity, his fondness for plants contribute significantly to his understanding of the need to preserve wilderness.