While I have been glued into fish my entire life, plants are only a recent passion of mine. However, they are perhaps the most important passion, as they helped steer me back to nature and get my life away from the destructive course I was on. In 2001, a bulldozer team came and cleared a successional forest next to the apartments where I was living. I found there was a very large sand dune concealed by the aspens, which I knew was relict of the glacial past, but didn't know much more about it than that. I walked the area and was suprised to find a plant that looked like the lupines my mom kept in her garden (it was wild blue lupine, Lupinus perennis ). This is what I call my "John Bartram Moment".

Click here to read about John and his son William.
      (Definately follow the external links, the Wiki article is pretty dry)

A week later, they leveled the dune into the surrounding marginal wetlands and put up a sign for the storage facility they were building on the tract. Angered by the senselessnes and ashamed to be part of a society that would destroy something so unique for another place to store our CRAP, I performed my usual duress response, and set to work on a case of beer. However, that lupine lit a spark, and somewhere in the night I realized I wasn't doing anything to help matters. I also realized if there was one lupine, there had to be more, and I needed to find out what they were.

Below are the results of my investigation. I've divided it into two segments, The Oak Openings Region, which was the direct result of my quest, and then a General Botanical section where I've been locally outside the sand ridge and abroad.