BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

WRITING ABOUT SCIENCE

True that a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower. Donald Culross Peattie, in Flowering Earth (1939).

Science writing, defined as ‘writing about science,’ has become a recognized profession. That was probably inevitable, given the extent to which science has reshaped human life, but one person who hurried the inevitable was Donald Culross Peattie, born in Chicago on June 21, 1898. Both his parents were prominent midwestern journalists (Omaha Daily Herald and then the Chicago Tribune), and his mother Ella was also a noted novelist and civil rights advocate (for women and people of color). Donald started out a French major (which would have some effect on his later life), but then came his annus mirabilis, 1919, when he took a break from office work in New York City to visit the Bronx Botanical Garden. He was smitten. So off he went, first on a collecting expedition up and down what became the Appalachian Trail and then a transfer to Harvard where he majored in botany. He graduated in 1922, a year which also saw his first publications. There were a couple of science research papers and a brief period working for the US Department of Agriculture. But he also won a prize for his poetry. He completed his quandary by marrying a novelist, Louise Redfield. In the future he would do some “science writing,” notably the still-standard field study Flora of the Indiana Dunes (1930), but for the most part he would write about science, mainly biology. He would write knowledgeably, of course, for he had the training. His works would be informative and full of the latest findings. Indeed he would be one of the first scientists to see the ant colony as a genetic organism in and of itself. But he wrote for a lay public, and he wanted his readers to appreciate the beauties of nature, its poetries. He got some daily training in this art through a column in The Washington Star , which came to literary fruition in his An Almanac for Moderns (1935) in which each day is greeted by a brief note on natural history. He and Louise Redfield lived in various places, including French Provence and the Illinois prairie, patches of planet earth on which he constructed eloquent nature studies. Along the way Peattie developed a special affinity for the tree: the tree in general but also the trees of this or that place, or of this or that botanical family. His tree books began with Trees You Want to Know (1934). His tendencies to poetry and personification date his work, making it seem a little too ‘flowery,’ if you don’t mind the pun, for today’s readers. But two of his tree surveys have been recently reprinted, and a compendium volume (A Natural History of North American Trees) appeared in 2007. Donald Peattie died in 1964, when his brother (a geologist, by the way) remembered him affectionately as a poet—and a bit of a pest. ©.