Human Flower Project

Friday, July 03, 2009

The Fruited Plain

Sometimes it takes a foreign visitor to open one’s eyes to the U.S.A. Allen Bush gets a heaping helping of Kansas and Nebraska flora, fruit, and pastry.

Pie-appreciation center (a.k.a. a Kansas diner)
Photo: Allen Bush

By Allen Bush

A car trip across Kansas, forty years ago, was an unending landscape of wheat stubble and Stuckey’s Pecan Shoppes—unavoidable if you were on a beeline to Denver or San Francisco. “Linger longer in Kansas,” the worn-out state tourism slogan, didn’t apply.

When Georg Uebelhart, my friend and Jelitto Perennial Seed colleague, came over from Germany for a visit in late May 1997, we did linger. Slivers of prairie remnants in Kansas and Nebraska had a peculiar appeal—more interesting, now, than the bright lights of the big western cities. Between us, we’ve traveled the Alps to the Altai and Andes poking around for plants. (Uebelhart, a native of Switzerland, has a sharp eye and an encyclopedic knowledge of plants – essential gifts for the best plant hunters.) It would be a stretch to call this work, but rarely does botanic obsession take on Indiana Jones-style intrigue, either. Occasional landslides and truck drivers, passing on blind curves, with perilous drop-offs and raging rivers hundreds of feet below have scared the wits out of us in a few far-flung places, but these aren’t worries in Kansas or Nebraska (though you should be careful for a speeding plantsman around Clarkson, Nebraska). The back roads in these parts are so desolate that an occasional passing car is more curious than death- threatening.

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