In the Flora: The Story of the West | The Legacy Grows: Lewis and Clark's Garden

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark introduced 176 plants to science. We went looking for those discoveries along the trail. Today, the captains would still find the same plants, but they wouldn’t recognize the places.

Rich Keintzman harvests his field of gold, a hybrid flax, in South Dakota

Sally Claggett of Washington treasures her floors made of yew. Rick Heintzman is a South Dakota farmer who plants flax. Idaho garden club members replant damaged lands and highways with penstemon seed frozen in ice cubes. Jamie Easter makes a living carving bows from osage orange wood in Iowa.

All of them — and many of us — are unwitting caretakers of the nearly 200-year-old botanical legacy of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

We remember Lewis and Clark’s great journey of exploration — their bravery against great odds and skill as outdoorsmen and the adventure of two friends. Their expedition is both celebrated as a monumental event that opened the West to settlement and lamented as the beginning of dark times for Native Americans.

But the untold story of the expedition resonates in the plants. Few know that the explorers diligently collected, preserved, studied and described almost 200 plants that were new to science, though long known by Native Americans.

Many of the plants the explorers collected still exist at the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia, and many offspring of their plant discoveries still stand in the same places Lewis and Clark saw them. Only one, a cultivated Native American tobacco, is extinct. The rest may be the most tangible reminders of their expedition.

"Lewis's journey across our continent has added a number of new plants to our former stock. Some of them are curious, some ornamental, some useful and some may by culture be made acceptable to our tables."

--Thomas Jefferson, 1813

In Iowa, Jamie Easter's shop walls are lined with the bows he carves of Osage orange.

In advance of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration beginning in 2003, The Oregonian retraced the trail looking for the plants where the explorers found them. The changes surely would have both thrilled and dismayed the captains and their group of explorers, the Corps of Discovery.

At some sites, such as the restored Fort Clatsop in Oregon and the preserved headwaters of the Missouri River, the plants thrive. The Missouri Breaks in central Montana, and parts of the Bitterroot Range between Montana and Idaho, remain relatively untouched. But people have changed the vast majority of the trail and its plant life for better and for worse. From the damming of the rivers to farming and grazing to expansion of cities and towns, we have forever altered the landscape.

Yet the plants live on, their stories intertwined with our own. Lewis fulfilled Thomas Jefferson’s mandate to seek useful plants for farming and for commerce. Some proved to be medical miracles that fight cancer, stave off colds and relieve pain. Some became state trees or flowers and helped build the West. We grow many in our yards; some we appreciate for their wild beauty. Others we’ve taken for granted, and they are threatened by development and invasive weeds. Native Americans still value many of the plants for their cultural, spiritual and physical health.

On the prairie where man has trod, non-native invasive plants follow.

Today it is difficult to think collecting plants was an important part of the captains’ mission when they set out from St. Louis on May 14, 1804.

Jefferson, who counted botany among his main pursuits, gave the explorers detailed instructions to explore the Missouri River, find a quick, efficient route to the Pacific Ocean, learn about Native Americans, observe weather and animals, and study the new territory’s plant life.

The explorers followed the directives dutifully. Clark made detailed maps of uncharted country, and Lewis described and collected plant and animal life.

Modern scientists say Lewis was a natural botanist. He had excellent observational skills and took detailed notes. He had little formal training but shared Jefferson’s love of useful plants. Lewis learned medicinal plant use from his mother, who was an herbalist, and he had a short but intensive tutelage from Philadelphia botanist Benjamin Smith Barton.

The explorer’s keen eye and dedication resulted in a plant collection that is unequaled in America in its historic and scientific value.

Among his discoveries were three new species — Lewis’s wild flax (Linum lewisii), Lewis’s monkey flower (Mimulus lewisii), Lewis’s syringa (Philadelphus lewisii) — and two new genera — Lewisia and Clarkia.

The Northwest was one of the most bountiful plant-collecting places for Lewis, who described 57 plants new to science between the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers in Washington to Fort Clatsop on the Oregon coast. Today Lewis and Clark plants are all around us. Lewis collected what became the Oregon state flower, Oregon grape (Berberis aquifolium), on the trip home at Celilo Falls. He found vine maple (Acer circinatum) where the Bridge of the Gods now stands and evergreen huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum) during the winter at Fort Clatsop.

But their journey — and ours — starts near St. Louis with the collection of osage orange (Maclura pomifera), the first in a legacy of plants that have stood as silent sentinels to the development of the West.

In the Flora The Story of the West

In the Flora
The Story of the West