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Elizabeth Uhlig:  This is an interview with Julie Nelson.  Today is May 16, 2004.  My name is Elizabeth Uhlig, archivist at Lane Community College. 

Julie, to start with, why don’t you tell us a little about your background, where you were born and raised, and how you became interested in botany.

Julie Kierstead Nelson:  I was born in Coos Bay, Oregon, on the Coast and spent my entire childhood there; graduated from high school, Marshfield High School in Coos Bay and then left.  My parents moved away from Coos Bay at that point and I went off to the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, which was the year that it opened.  It was 1971.  And I didn’t stay there past the first year.  I left college and worked downtown in Portland for a bit, and then moved to Eugene and lived with my sister who was going to the University of Oregon at that time. 

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And after I had been living with her for about six months I wanted to go back to school and went with a friend of mine to registration at LCC not really knowing what I was after.  I had started as an art major, with no background or particular interest in science or biology.  And I went to registration at LCC not knowing what I was registering for and just eavesdropped on some other people that were in the registration area and heard a couple of people talking enthusiastically about Jay Marston as an instructor and this class that he was teaching about wild foods.  So I thought what the heck, and I signed up for it, and was very quickly engaged by Jay’s charisma, and one thing led to another and I ended up taking I think all of Jay’s classes and then all of Freeman Rowe’s classes because I go to know Freeman through Jay. And he’s also a very charismatic figure.

EU:  How many years were you at Lane, then, as a student?

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JKN:  Well, you know, I don’t remember exactly.  I think it was two and a half.  Freeman seems to think it was somewhat longer.

EU:  About Jay, then.  What courses did you take from him?  I understand you worked with him with drawing?

JKN:  Well, I’m hazy on it at this point.  The first class I took was “Wild Foods” from Jay.  And I did take the year-long biology course that he taught, as well.  And.  What was the other question?

EU:  Did you work with him?  I understand you did drawing with him?

JKN:  I had a work-study job for the department and so I did a number of tasks for Jay and for Freeman - pretty much whatever they asked me to do, although they gave me a lot of latitude to follow my own interests.  And, it was Jay’s class that first required herbarium collection.  And the next time the herbarium collection requirement came around in Freeman’s class I asked him if I could draw some plants instead.  And he said, sure, and so I ended up drawing, I don’t know, about a dozen different native plants.  And he really like them, and so then I went ahead and he asked me to – I don’t remember if it was his idea or my idea or jointly, but I ended up doing a little field guide to the characteristics of plant families of western Oregon.  He used that in his classes, and Jay used that in his classes.  And I was a teaching assistant in the labs, for in particular the wildflowers class.

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EU:  When you said, for a non-specialist like me, when you said the class required herbarium work, what exactly did that mean?

JKN:  What a herbarium specimen is is simply a plant specimen that is collected, pressed flat in a plant press, and dried so that it won’t deteriorate.  And then it’s glued down usually to an archival quality piece of paper with a label on it that has information about when it was collected, where it was collected, and by whom.  So it’s a documentation of the presence of a particular plant species at a particular place at a particular time.  The specimen itself is of little value unless it has the documentation with it of where and when it was collected and by whom.

EU:  So you would go out and collect plants from this area, western Oregon, or the Eugene area, for these classes?

JKN:  Yes, a lot of them were collected right around the campus.  And a lot of them were just weedy species, because Freeman and Jay at that point were already cognizant of the need to limit collecting by their students of native plants because of the repeated collection year after year of native plants could diminish or wipe out a local population of a native plant and they didn’t want that to happen.

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EU:  Getting back to Jay, you said he was very charismatic.  Could you give us some examples?  What did he leave you with?  What kind of impact did he have on you?

JKN:  He was very energetic, he was a very energetic person and a very animated lecturer and teacher.  And I think most of his students would have just followed him anywhere.  He was like the pied piper.  He laughed a lot.  And he was very good at creating lessons in his classes that were experiential rather than just talking to us.  I remember one time as part of his biology class when we were studying genetics, and human genetics in particular.  He loaded us up and took us to the state institution for developmentally disabled people and seeing a child with, I forget what it’s called, an enlarged brain, an encephalopathy of some kind of course is a much more powerful memory than hearing somebody talk about it.  And he always added, especially in talking about the human genetics, I remember in particular, there was an ethical dimension there of what does it mean to be disabled in terms of your rights as a citizen.  And that stayed with me in a way that a dry lecture never would have. And, I just adored him.  I would have done anything he asked essentially. He was so fun.

EU:  And you said you worked with him on a description of the plants of western Oregon?

JKN:  It was a little handout of plant family characteristics that would help beginning students to remember and recognize the characteristics of different plant families.  So, what makes something in the lily family a lily and not an orchid. Or what makes something a mustard and not a figwort - that kind of thing.  And so I got to indulge my interest in doing plant drawings and then I also wrote out the descriptive, distinctive characteristics. I was pleased to see that Gail Baker is still using that in her classes.  That pleases me.

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EU:  You said you had a background in art?  That obviously related then to your work?

JKN:  I started out as an art major and discontinued that for one reason or another. But part of my interest in plants has been an aesthetic interest, because I think they are marvelously constructed and beautiful.

EU:  What became your specialty?  Did you have an area of specialty.  It seems people specialize in one kind of plant?

JKN:  What I like best and what I’m best at is simply plant identification and systematics, which means how different plants are related to each other and how they are grouped in genera and families.  And being able to look at a plant like that camas over there and say that’s a camas – it’s obvious to me it’s got six stepals and six stamens and staph-like leaves.  I like helping people identify plants.

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EU:  What about Freeman Rowe, then?  How did he influence you?

JKN:  Well, Freeman is such a delightful – I think of him kind of like an elf, he’s like a sprite.  He takes just such delight in the natural world and also in the people that he teaches and interacts with, and so he makes it fun and exciting to go out in the woods to look for mushrooms.  He laughs a lot and doesn’t take himself very seriously.  And he gets people out, he gets people outdoors, to where we got to see these marvelous things.  And he’d always have some interesting tidbit to tell us about this particular mushroom, about how it glows in the dark or if you peel off the slimy outside of it it’s really quite tasty.  Just lots of information tidbits.  And I know I’m an information junky, and I think a lot of people around him are information junkies, too.  So he’s full of information and the way that he imparts it is delightfully fun.

EU:  As a student or working with him did you go out on field trips then?

JKN:  Yah,, all the biology classes, the 101 series, were intensely field oriented and almost all of them seem to incorporate a lot of eating - the wild foods, certainly, and the mushroom identification class and the marine biology class.  We always managed on our field trips to collect things that we could cook and eat. So there were always feasts and evening social gatherings associated with these field trips.  And there were a couple of times, there were people on the field trips that would do dumb things, like they would eat things that they didn’t know or they would eat things that Freeman had said this is poisonous but it’s hallucinogenic before it makes you sick.  And so there’d somebody that would eat it and he would drag them off and make them throw up.  And that kind of added to the excitement.

EU:  Did you take courses with Rhoda Love?

JKN: I never took a class with Rhoda.  She was there as a teacher.  She was teaching Botany at the time, and I interacted with her because I was working and she was teaching.  But I never did take a class from her.  I stayed acquainted with her later when I was at OregonState and she was involved there.

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EU:  You were there the other day when they dedicated the Herbarium, and they named it after Rhoda and Freeman.  Were you involved with the establishment of the Herbarium?

JKN:  Well, I collected, I don’t know, the list that Gail [Baker] had up the other day, it looked like there were maybe 70 or 75 specimens that I collected - so a fairly small percentage of the specimens that were in there.  But, really, that was the beginning of my lifelong, so far, interest in plant identification.  And I have retained an interest in herbaria and in collecting.  I have a collecting book and I’ve collected probably a hundred specimens this year that will probably go to the University of California Herbarium.   So it’s remained an interest and something that I think is valuable for scientific documentation for the future.

EU:  How do you decide which plants to collect?  Are these one’s that no one else has documented before?

KJN:  I try to focus on not recollecting things that are already well known in the geographic area that I’m in.  So I try to go either for new records or unusual forms that expand the box of the current description - something that’s bigger or hairier or has a different flower color or something that would add to the existing body of information about that particular plant.  And I’ve typically lived in places where the botanical documentation is pretty thin, so I’ve been able to collect a lot of things over the years that were not already in herbaria.

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EU:  What was your basic – what did you take away from LCC?  If you could say one or two things that you gained, what are the most important things that you took from LCC, and, on the other hand, what did you give to LCC?

JKN:  Well, I certainly took away a love of botany, and a conviction that botany was really fun. Let me think.  And I took away a conviction that not only was botany fun, but that botanists were fun and were people that I wanted to know and be associated with.  And I took away some philosophical underpinnings about botany that I described the other night at the dinner – a kind of a pragmatic outlook and humanistic outlook about botany.  That it’s not about putting things in boxes or being snooty about the pronunciation. It’s about relating the natural world to other people in a way that catches their interest and conveys a love and connection with the natural world. And I certainly took away a love of those people.  And I hope I left behind a sense of love and appreciation of those people that were so important to my development as a human.

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EU:  Then after Lane you went to OSU?

JKN:  I went to Oregon State.  They have a, unlike the University of Oregon at the time, OregonState had a very field oriented biology and botany department. So I went to OregonState to finish my training.  And since I had already taken much of the undergraduate program at LCC, I ended up finishing with mostly graduate classes in botany.  And I went to work there for the curator of the herbarium as the herbarium secretary.  And that was really fun – Kenten Chambers was the curator at the time.  He also was a delightful, quirky person.  He liked to break into Gilbert and Sullivan operetta songs periodically.  And he remains my model for the perfect, gracious letter.  He wrote a wonderful letter with a wonderful salutation and a wonderful ending in a way of communicating clearly and subtly – he could be very gracious about indicating that he was annoyed with you, in a way that you’d almost not even figure it out until a couple of days later and you’d go back, and ‘uh, I think he was annoyed with me.”  Very erudite man, a very delightful person.

EU:  Then you got a BA - BS from Oregon State?

JKN:  I got a BS in Botany from Oregon State in 1979 and then I went off to NorthernArizona University in Flagstaff to get a graduate degree.  And got a Master’s degree from Northern Arizona and then moved back to Portland.

EU:  Was that degree in botany?

JKN:  It was actually in biology because they didn’t have botany degree as a graduate program so I ended up for my graduate degree mostly taking mammalogy and other zoology and ecology classes.  So I had pretty much already taken all of the graduate botany program back at OSU, so there wasn’t a lot new except for a whole new flora to look at there.

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EU:  I forgot, I wanted to ask you.  You said you had worked with Rhoda at OSU?

JKN:  Rhoda was involved – Rhoda was getting her PhD at that time.  At the time I met her she had a Master’s degree, and after that she went back to school at the University of Oregon to get her PhD doing a dissertation on Hawthorne’s and so I had some interaction with her when she came up to the Herbarium.  And also we were both pretty heavily involved in the Native Plant Society at that point and so I got to know Rhoda some through NPSO, and less as a teacher than as a fellow NPSO member.

EU:  If I jump around too much, let me know.

JKN:  That’s OK, I have kids.  They jump around a lot.

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EU:  Then, with your degree – did your degree at Northern Arizona broaden your interest in ecology and the environment – did it bring that into your botany?

JKN:  It gave me a perspective.  Actually, when I was at LCC, at the time I that was at Lane, during the summer, I went out to a place called Malheur Field Station, which had a very active summer field program of everything from botany to herpetology, ecology, anthropology, drawing. It was a pretty wide program – it was administered through Portland State at that time anyway.  And so I developed, really the first big, intensive field work that I did was in the Great Basin of southeastern Oregon in Harney County and Malheur County.  And so I developed a real affection for the Great Basin.  Because, again the flora was interesting, but I developed an association of having fun while doing that, and so I developed an affection for the flora because of the fun that I had with the other people that were there. 

So when I went to Northern Arizona, I got some context in being exposed to the southern end of the Great Basin.  In Oregon I was at the northern end of the Great Basin, and so I got to see the other end of the picture.  And also got exposed to a Chihuahuan and SonoranDesert flora.  So I got a better rounded sense of how other floras and other climates interacted, and also other regional people.  I had gone to Arizona thinking that everybody was the same everywhere and came back thinking they are not. People in Arizona are different from Oregonians in some distinctive behavioral ways.

EU:  So did you work in that area?

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JKN:  Not much, I did a couple consulting jobs.  But after I finished my Master’s degree - I was married by that point, and we moved back to Portland in 1981.  And so I worked briefly for the Nature Conservancy there in Portland and was hired by the BerryBotanic Garden to start a fledgling program that they had gotten funded to do a seed bank for endangered northwest native plants.

EU:  I’m not familiar with the Berry Botanic Garden.

JKN:  BerryBotanic Garden.  It was the estate of a woman named Rae Selling Berry in southwest Portland near Lewis and ClarkCollege.  And she had this I think six-acre estate.  She had a huge number of different plant species and one of her favorite areas for collection and growing of the plants was native plants. And she had a lot of alpines, and she also propagated and grew just lots and lots of natives.  And so, when she died her children wanted to sell the property, and the Portland Garden Club raised the money to purchase the property and turn it into a 501-C3 non-profit organization.  And so that was three or four years, about, maybe a little longer, before they applied for this grant money, I think it was from the Fred Meyer Foundation that funded the beginnings of the seed bank. 

And so they hired me to start this off.  And I spent a lot of time on the road to Native Plant Society chapters in Oregon and Washington primarily and other plant organizations, the heritage programs in Oregon and Washington, trying to convince them that this off-site conservation of seeds was in no way a threat to conserving plants in their native habitats.  That was really the political issue at the time.  But it was a great opportunity to get to know lots of different people and lots of different Native Plant Society chapters and agency people in the Forest Service and BLM who managed many acres of public land in Oregon and Washington. And the Rock Garden Society and a variety of other people that were interested in native plant conservation.

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EU:  Did you also do description work then – contributing plants to different herbarium?

JKN:  I did a fair amount of collecting then and lots of plant photography with an old single-lens reflex Olympus.  So I had a big slide collection that I let other people use and contributed to publications.  And I also became editor of the Native Plant Society state newsletter for several years. And at that point I was also actively doing illustration work and contributing that to whoever wanted it.

EU:  Would that have been for publications?

JKN:  I used it in the Native Plant Society newsletter, and I also did some illustration for scientific publications of new species - mostly graduate students that I had met at Oregon State when I was working there that were describing new species as part of their dissertation work and needed somebody to draw a picture for their publication.

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EU:  So how long were you at Portland and where did you go to next?

JKN:  Well, I was in Portland until 1988, and then I moved to Redding, California, and took a job with the Forest Service with the Shasta-Trinity National Forest in Redding, and I’ve been there ever since.

EU:  So what kind of work have you done there?

JKN:  You know – I’m a bureaucrat.  I started out doing a lot of plant surveys and writing a lot of, what are called, biological evaluations which are analysis of potential effects on rare plants from Forest Service management activities whether its timber sales, recreation facility building, road building, watershed restoration, engineering projects, that kind of stuff.  And over the years I’ve migrated more and more toward supervision and more policy-making, and we’ve hired other people to do more of the field work.  So at this point I’m a senior botanist rather than a field-going botanist, for the most part.

EU:  Do you continue to collect, then?   You said you’d be leaving some of your specimens to northern California?

 JKN:  Yes, I do. I usually, if I collect more than one duplicate of any given collection, I send it to the Jackson Herbarium at the University of California.  Sometimes I send things to Oregon State, and I do keep a set for the National Forest in Redding. I have a small herbarium collection there.  It’s used for training and for anybody that comes to do research there.

EU:  Do you have much contact with the public – with the visitors that come through – in giving talks to or guide tours?

JKN:  Periodically I am engaged with the local Native Plant Society chapter and we get maybe a dozen requests a year for scientific collection permits, and I’m the liaison for those people to get them permits and tell them where to go to find their research subjects.  And I usually do a couple of field trip presentations a year – again, mostly the folks that are out in the ranger districts do more of that.  And partly that’s because I had young kids and wasn’t as available in evenings and weekends for a while until they got bigger. And I’m starting to get back into that now.

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EU: Can you talk about this Karl Urban Celebration Award that you were recognized with recently?

JKN:  Sure.  Karl Urban was a lovely man, a botanist in Pendleton – he taught for many years at Blue MountainCommunity College.  And I met him at Malheur Field Station.  He was teaching a summer class on flora of Steens Mountain.  And, which I never took the class, but I got acquainted with him and I had lots of friends who took the class.  And after he had taught at Blue Mountain for a number of years, he was hired by Umatilla National Forest to be their forest botanist.  And he also did a lot of plant illustration – he did a set of black and white plates for a coloring book of native plants of Oregon, particularly eastern Oregon.  And he died, sadly, prematurely of cancer.  And this award was named in his honor to recognize someone from the United States who had been effective in promoting the enjoyment and conservation of native plants.  And so I was thrilled to get this award, because I admire and remember Karl.

EU:  When did you get that award and what specifically what were they recognizing?

JKN:  It was three years ago that I was given the award.  I was nominated by a woman named Barbara Williams who was the forest botanist on Klamath National Forest.  And I don’t think it was for any one thing.  It was for publication of  the book that I edited on rare plants of northern California, and the leadership of a group of northern California agency botanists that we call “An-bot” that has about twenty ad-hoc members, and for activity in the Native Plant Society, and for helping lobby for the endangered species act, the Oregon Endangered Species Act that was passed before I left Oregon.  You know, I’m not sure that I deserve it any more than any number of people, but I was flattered and pleased to get the award.

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EU:  What else might you add?  Am I leaving something out that you’d like to say?

JKN:  Let me think. I took – my husband and I took a trip to Baja with Jay Marston and Marcia Peters in 1988.  And, that was so much fun.  It was a chance for me to - well, I hadn’t seen Jay for a while at that point because I had been up at Corvallis and when I came back and went on this trip with him and Marcia it was less as a student-teacher relationship and more as a friend relationship.  And so I got to know him a little better.  He was such a funny guy, very energetic, very opinionated - just a pistol.  I can imagine he would be infuriating to live with or infuriating to try to have any kind of a close relationship with.  But he was just great fun as a friend, as long as – he was great company.  He was very entertaining.  He knew a lot about a lot of things, and he knew how to have a great time.  And he knew where all the good places in Baja were, so he took us to some wonderful places.  And I still have a couple of wonderful pieces of – oh, gosh, I’ve forgotten the name of the rock, I want to say onyx but I don’t think that was it. It was from an old hot spring in Baja, and then we camped out at Playa      de las Angeles.  And, that was fun.  So I just miss him a lot.  I miss Jay a lot.  I wish he were alive.  And I’m glad Freeman’s still around.  And I’m glad Rhoda’s still around.

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EU:  Anything else?

JKN:  No, I can’t think of anything else, unless there’s something else that you want to add.

Well, that I should say.  It seems as though Gail Baker is carrying on the tradition in a fine way that keeps the community engaged.  That’s been the wonderful gift of LCC’s  Biology Department is the degree to which the community, and that means all ages, not just people who come for course credit to transfer to a university, but the community part of the education program I think is just fabulously successful and spills over into all these wonderful community conservation and education efforts like this wildflower show and all of the various societies and the nature walks and the efforts to conserve local, small, special places.  I think this LCC program has had a lot to do with producing a population in Eugene that is aware and enthusiastic - that goes out and does effective conservation.  Because without the people there to impart this information, even the most well-meaning person just really wouldn’t know what to do or where to start to do something worthwhile.  So my hat’s off to them.

EU:  Thank you very much, Julie.

JKN:  You’re very welcome.

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