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Vol. 26:4 ISSN 0160-8460 December 1998
A Botanist's Life: The Ewan Papers at the Missouri Botanical Garden
by Connie Wolf
For more than ten years, from 1986 until 1997, lunch with the Ewans in the Missouri Botanical Garden's Museum Building served as a forum for botanists, librarians, bibliophiles, and students of natural history. It was the Museum Building that held the treasures collected over a lifetime by Joe and Nesta Ewan. Whatever the topic of conversation, Joe would trot off to find a book, a letter, or a bit of biographical information to illuminate the subject at hand. "Knowledge is so much more than a collection of isolated facts," he is fond of saying. "The interrelationships among disciplines yield a far deeper insight. For example, knowing about insects illuminates the understanding of pollination. Understanding a botanical specimen involves knowing when, where, and why it was collected, at what season, and what forces may have influenced its development." It is this deep understanding of interrelationships among all living organisms that inspired the Ewans' careful collecting in the field of natural history, and gave them a wealth of knowledge and rich resources from which to draw for their research, writing, and teaching.
Joe Ewan rests during a hike in the Flatirons above Boulder, Colorado, 1942. Photograph by Lincoln Ellison, from the Ewan Collection, Missouri Botanical Garden Library.
Joe Ewan began his bibliographical and historical studies in the 1920s while he was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. Early in his career, he made a major scientific contribution with his study on Delphinium, a large and difficult group of plants. In graduate school, he served as research assistant to Willis Linn Jepson, who was then preparing his Flora of California. After four years with Jepson, he taught at the University of Colorado, 1937 to 1944. He spent a year during World War II in Colombia, South America, with the Cinchona Survey, helping to locate new sources of quinine. He then received curatorial appointments with the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Department of Agriculture.
Ewan returned to academic life in 1947 at Tulane University, where he remained for 39 years, teaching, collecting books, and influencing students and biologists who sought his counsel. In 1977, he retired as the Ida Richardson Professor of Botany Emeritus and remained at Tulane until 1986. He spent the 1954-1955 academic year in Europe as a Guggenheim Fellow studying early American natural history, and 1984-1985 as Regents Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. Throughout his career as a botanist and teacher, he published more than 400 books, essays, and reviews. Joe, with the assistance of his wife, Nesta Dunn Ewan (especially in the later years, after their three daughters were grown), continually searched for just the right book, just the right reference, just the right word, all the time forming the Ewan Collection.
By the time the Missouri Botanical Garden purchased the Ewan Collection in 1986, it had become one of the largest and richest privately owned natural history collections in the world. It had expanded from an initial emphasis on taxonomic botany into the history of biology, including botany, entomology, ornithology, mammalogy, and geology, involving biography, bibliography, and exploration. An important feature of the Ewan Collection is the foreign-language editions of better-known English titles. Also important are the Association copies, preserved dust wrappers, and relevant bibliogaphic notes. The Ewan Papers complement the Ewan Book Collection by including materials directly associated with the books. The papers contain unique materials, including correspondence with international personages, botanists, bibliophiles, physicians, students, and professors; manuscript notes; printed biographies; photographs; autographs; cards; memorabilia; and bits of little-known biographical material about botanists who contributed to science but may not have made it into the major biographical reference works.
The Ewans, nearly 80 years old, moved to St. Louis with their books and papers to continue using them, along with the Garden Library, for their research and writing. They also continued collecting, so that their book collection currently exceeds 6,000 titles, and their archival collection is larger than ever. The combination of the Ewans and their collections resulted in an in-depth resource for learning about natural history at the Garden. Their concern as they approached 90 years of age was how to make their collections useful to researchers in the future, when they no longer would be available to find the materials. Without the Ewans, how could researchers, in the habit of calling or writing to find this or that bit of information, know what is contained in the Ewan Collection? The Garden had committed itself to catalog the book collection, thereby making it accessible worldwide through the Internet. But it is the Ewan Papers that contain the unique archival materials. How would anyone know what the Ewan Papers contained without traveling to the Garden?
Joe Ewan examines examples of native flora on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, July 1967. Photograph by Hugh Iltis, from the Ewan Collection, Missouri Botanical Garden Library.
The only answer seemed to be a guide to the Ewan archival papers. The Ewans, along with the Garden archives staff, were anxious to create the guide, but financial assistance would be needed to assemble and publish all of the information. Enter the NHPRC. With a generous grant of almost $21,000, the Garden was able to hire archives assistant Douglas Holland and purchase archival containers to preserve the materials. Doug worked with archives staff members Martha Riley and Mary Stiffler, as well as many dedicated volunteers, to organize the project; to arrange, preserve, and describe the materials; to key the descriptions into a computer program; and to prepare the manuscript for publication. The resulting Guide to the Ewan Papers provides access to these significant primary source materials on American natural history and biography. It was published in 1997 by the Missouri Botanical Garden Press, and will soon be available via the Internet.
As the Guide was being completed, the Ewans retired closer to where they had lived during their 39 years at Tulane. They continue to be interesting people in part because they are interested in, and ever so curious about, the living world. Joe is fond of telling how a fellow student inscribed the following words in his high school yearbook: "May you get better than you deserve." All who know the Ewans know they deserve all they receive, and then some. They freely share their knowledge, and they receive in the measure in which they give.
(Connie Wolf is the Missouri Botanical Garden's Librarian.)
