Man retraces explorers’ botanical trail

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did more than explore the West, fight grizzlies and intimidate the locals. Their presidential marching orders also included collecting plants from the plains and forests of the West.

Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most plant-loving president of all time, was not disappointed. The 239 specimens gathered by the Corps of Discovery represented infinite possibilities for food, perfume, shade and beauty.

A nurseryman from Montana is now retracing the explorers’ botanical trail with an eye on cloning and sharing some of the grandest specimens along the route, including trees that stand sentinel as the only living witnesses to the exploration of 200 years ago. Martin Flanagan hopes the project will not only honor the efforts of Lewis and Clark, but also boost the popularity of species they documented.

“There’s not a lot of fun in the nursery business these days,” Flanagan said. “It’s gotten dull.”

Flanagan is not following the path directly. His goal is to find and clone the biggest living specimens of the 15 tree and 61 shrub species documented by the explorers. This week he was searching a mountainside near Coeur d’Alene – more than 100 miles off the explorers’ route – for the nation’s largest Western chokecherry tree.

Although the Corps of Discovery had scientific and economic motivations for collecting plants, the explorers also depended on them for nutrition and survival. Chokecherry serves as a good example, Flanagan said, citing a journal entry from Lewis dated June 11, 1805. Lewis was near the Great Falls of the Missouri in Montana when he was overcome by “such violent pain in the intestens that I was unable to partake of the feast of marrowbones,” according to his journal.

The explorer drank a concoction made from the sour fruit of the chokecherry tree and later reported, “I was entirely relieved from pain and in fact every symptom of the disorder forsook me.”

Flanagan’s quest is guided by a detailed series of maps and journal entries, but it would be nearly impossible to find the exact settings where the original expedition gathered their specimens. Instead, Flanagan is focusing on finding the largest examples of each species. Hunting for giant trees has long been a passion for Flanagan, who is the Rocky Mountain representative for Champion Tree Project International, a nonprofit group that aims to protect and propagate the nation’s largest living trees.

By taking cuttings from champion trees along the Lewis and Clark Trail, Flanagan hopes he has a better chance of propagating specimens with strong genes. Plus, the resulting plants will have the added allure of being from trees listed in state and national registers as champions. Whenever Flanagan identifies a suitable specimen, he obtains permission to take a series of cuttings, then sends the cuttings to nurseries in Oregon. There, the cloning is done using traditional air layering or root-stock grafting techniques.

“The collection is neat, but going after the champions of the species is even neater,” Flanagan said. “It just adds more to it.”

More than half of the specimens collected by the original explorers came from Idaho, said Steven Brunseld, a University of Idaho School of Forestry professor. “That’s our claim to fame,” said Brunsfeld, who wrote the botanical footnotes for the Moulton edition of “The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” considered the most accurate and comprehensive version of the journals.

The explorers spent nearly a month in late spring of 1806 camping near present-day Kamiah, Idaho, waiting for the mountain snows to melt. The group had left behind caches of collected plants east of the Rocky Mountains, but they would eventually discover the caches had been swept away by the Missouri River, Brunsfeld said. Lewis, an amateur botanist, supervised the gathering and preservation of plants.

“Lewis had minimal training but he was a brilliant observer and had tutelage from the president – now there’s a thought,” Brunsfeld said.

Flanagan and his family set off about two weeks ago from his home in the small Montana town of Big Timber – no joke – and began gathering cuttings along stretches of the Upper Missouri River. He’s driving an Explorer sport utility vehicle donated by Ford. Much of his time is spent wandering the woods. In coming weeks he plans to follow the expedition’s route through Idaho and to the Oregon coast.

So far, Flanagan’s collection has focused mostly on Montana. Along the Marias River in the northern part of the state, he took cuttings from plains cottonwood, green ash and box elder. He found a prime serviceberry specimen on the Yorks Islands of the Missouri River. Along the Smith River, he found a champion narrowleaf cottonwood. Flanagan has already cloned a 144-foot-tall national champion quaking aspen growing near Troy, Mont.

Although Flanagan’s targets have spent thousands of years adapting to the climate of the northern Rockies, Flanagan said he is frustrated that most nurseries continue to favor less-hardy exotics. Flanagan grows more than 30 species of native trees and shrubs on his family’s ranch along the Yellowstone River. His own home, an old parsonage, has become a refuge of sorts for old lilacs and yellow roses dug from abandoned homesteads. Flanagan will never know their stories, but he said he is drawn to them as living witnesses to history.

Flanagan hopes the Lewis and Clark Collection of Plants might help spark renewed interest in native plants or history. He doesn’t know when the first plants from the collection will be available for sale. Much depends on the success of the cloning. Flanagan said he and the Champion Tree Project International will earn a small royalty from each sale, but he doubts the money will amount to much. “Maybe in 50 or 100 years my kids will benefit from this,” he said. “I’m just doing this because this is what I love.”

Although most nurseries have not yet tapped into consumers’ emotional or historical connections with trees, the potential exists, said Ron Mahoney, director of Idaho’s Big Tree Program, which is operated through the University of Idaho Extension. Flanagan’s project also has the potential to generate excitement in an often-ignored aspect of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

“It’s a great idea,” Mahoney said. “There’s a lot of different ways we can live and preserve history. Trees mean a lot to people.”