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THE INTERMOUNTAIN WEST, an area the size of Texas that stretches from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevada, harbors some 4,000 species of vascular plants. Noel H. Holmgren and Patricia K. Holmgren are engaged in a marathon project to collect, catalog, and describe them all.
They have been collaborating on the effort for more than 30 years- ever since they were married, in 1969. Since then, they have spent all or part of almost every summer exploring the region in a camper that, Noel Holmgren says, "serves as our laboratory, kitchen, dining area, office, bedroom, and safe haven when it stormS."
When they are done, within about five years, they will have produced a fully illustrated, six-volume catalog, known as Intermountain Flora: Vascular Plants of the Intermountain West, U.SA. Five of the volumes have been published thus far, all by the New York Botanical Garden, where both Holmgrens work-he as the curator of botany at the garden's Institute of Systematic Botany, and she as the director of its herbarium. Work on the first volume began in 1969, and it was published in 1972.
The territory covered by Intermountain Flora comprises parts or all of seven states-Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. Despite earlier scientific expeditions and their own work-the Holmgrens calculate that they have driven about 270,000 miles on their field research-parts of the region remain unexplored, floristically at least. "Even today," Patricia Holmgren says, "there are mountain ranges in Nevada that have never had a botanist on them."
The fieldwork varies from year to year-on some expeditions the Holmgrens focus on a single plant family, on others they collect everything from a specific area. They return to sites at different times during the summer to make sure they see plants when they are flowering or in fruit. In August, they visited Abajo Peak in San Juan County, Utah, to look for a plant in the mallow family, the only existing specimen of which was collected in 1911. They didn't find the mallow, but elsewhere in southeastern...