During a visit to the Johannesburg Botanical Garden in January, Glenn Adelson found a surprising lack of botanists.
“There was only someone there selling hot dogs,” said Adelson, an associate professor and chair of the environmental studies department at Lake Forest College. “Not a botanist on sight. Not an information desk. That threw me for a loop.”
Adelson, who is traveling the world for a year to take photographs of wildflowers, came up with the idea for the trip three months before he left on Dec. 29.
“I think most ideas (but not all) are like fish. You don’t create them, you catch them,” Adelson said. “So on one level, it just popped into my head one day, and I caught it.”
He bought a new iPhone and flew to Zimbabwe for two weeks, then traveled around southern Africa with a day trip into Lesotho.
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He then returned to campus from Feb. 20 to 24. On Feb. 25, he drove to New Mexico and the southwest United States to watch desert flowers bloom in March and afterward conduct laboratory work at UCLA.
Next comes exploring the flora of California, then the north shore of Alaska followed by stops in Canada. In July, he’ll fly to Europe – he hopes to get to St. Petersburg, Russia, during the summer. Then he’ll head back to South Africa in September, followed by China, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand in October.
The highlight of his trip so far has been photographing a Welwitschia mirabilis in the Namib Desert in southern Africa.
“It’s the world’s ugliest plant,” Adelson said. “This is a 1,600-year-old plant growing in the Namib Dessert. There are separate female and male plants. It’s the only cone-bearing plant that is insect-pollinated. The places where it grows, basically nothing else grows there. They can’t grow too near water or so far away from water. It’s one I’ve wanted to see ever since I started learning about botany. I took six days and 1,000 miles to see that.”
There are no guarantees when it comes to finding wildflowers, particularly in the wilderness.
“Sometimes it’s well-populated (with wildflowers), sometimes it’s not,” Adelson said. “I spent five or six days where I got very little out of it. I’ve spent a lot of my field botany career with the knowledge that it was a 50-50 proposition that I’d find anything.”
He has multiple goals for his trip, including writing an article, a possible book of photographs and increasing his knowledge of connections between plant families in Chicago and other parts of the world for teaching.
“When you see something rather than just read it, when you see them in the wild, you have a much deeper knowledge,” Adelson said.
With the assistance of a departmental assistant, Adelson learned how to use Instagram, where he is posting his photos along with plant background as a student resource. Since he started the account, he’s gained nearly 1,600 followers. His Instagram account is https://www.instagram.com/thoughtstoodeepfortears/
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