An Arkansas Florilegium
When I arrived in the Ozarks in December 1979 at age 22, one of the first tasks was to find books of plants in Arkansas. At the time there was only one work on the Arkansas flora: An Atlas and Annotated List of the Vascular Plants of Arkansas by the late Edwin B. Smith (1936-2017), then Professor of Botany at the University of Arkansas. The first printing of the Smith Atlas was self-published in 1978, with a second hardcover printing issued in 1979. Prof. Smith issued a second edition (with many additions) in 1988. Smith also penned Keys to the Flora of Arkansas published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1994. A new Atlas of the Vascular Plants of Arkansas published in 2013 by the Arkansas Vascular Flora Project, built upon the earlier work of Edwin B. Smith.
Soon after arriving in Arkansas four decades ago, I met a modern Thoreau acolyte Ozark naturalist, Kent Bonar, who for decades has lived alone, off-the-grid, in a remote home hidden in the wilds of Newton County. Kent Bonar is a consummate field observer of the natural world. His encyclopedia, his Google, is nature herself.
Like me, Kent Bonar, owned a copy of the 1978 Smith Atlas. My copy went on a shelf of floristic reference books. Kent’s copy went to the field with him. As he found plants in the book, he penned (with quill and inkwell) detailed illustrations of the plants he encountered, and added numerous margin notes (both vertically and horizontally) to aid in identification or place of encounter.
Several years ago, a number of friends of Kent saw the value of his unique, annotated, illustrated copy of Smith’s Atlas, and realized its intrinsic value as art and information. Since Kent had dropped it in a creek or two, a committee of five admirers coaxed the weathered, dog-eared (and perhaps dog-gnawed) copy from Kent Bonar’s possession, with the promise of preserving the work for all to see.
Properly conserved and archived, the University of Arkansas Press has just released a landmark publication – Kent Bonar’s An Arkansas Florilegium: The Atlas of Botanist Edwin Smith, illustrated by Naturalist Kent Bonar. The beautifully reproduced work contains more than 3,500 illustrations in the 650-page book, along with an Introduction by Robert Cochran, Series Editor for the “Arkansas Character” series from the U of A Press. A book signing will be held 7-9 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 14, at the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks, 4703 N. Crossover Road, Fayetteville.