Floyd Swink (1921-2000)

Floyd Swink, 70, a genius at identifying plants and perhaps the foremost botanist and plant taxonomist in this region, died on August 2 at his home in Wheaton, Illinois.

Swink will be forever identified with the plants of the Chicago region. He made it his life’s work to get to know them and to record their distribution, habitats, and plant associates—and to make that information public and accessible in four editions of Plants of the Chicago Region, considered one of the most comprehensive floras in existence. In it, Swink and junior author Gerould Wilhelm prepared a system of identification keys and devised a way to assess the quality of various natural communities. This work has aided immeasurably in the conservation of biodiversity in the region.

Swink was a man of ardent enthusiams: ice cream, speed typing, birds, plants. A dedicated teacher, he motivated his students with his mastery of many subjects while he delighted them with droll botanical puns. He was unfailingly generous with his time, always ready to answer "What is this plant?" or to explain how to tell the difficult woodland sunflowers apart.

From 1957 to 1960 he worked as a naturalist for the Forest Preserve District of Cook County, then joined the Morton Arboretum as a teacher of botany and natural history. In 1963 he became the Arboretum’s plant taxonomist and helped to identify more than half of the woody species on the Arboretum’s 1,700 acres. Swink played a crucial role in helping to save some of the finest prairie remnants in the region, including Santa Fe Prairie in Hodgkins.

Swink is remembered by legions of nature lovers throughout Chicago Wilderness who had the good fortune to walk through the prairies or woods and listen to him reel off Latin names and tell sweet stories.