Dwarfed by tall grasses, Floyd Swink discusses botany with colleague Gerould Wilhelm. Together they have authored two editions of the classic Plants of the Chicago Region. Photo by Jim Nachel.

Floyd Swink, The Man Who Made Plants Fun
by Lori Rotenberk

Along with his dearly beloved tulip tree and orange-fringed orchid, Floyd Swink, perhaps the foremost botanist and plant taxonomist in the Chicago Wilderness region, also has been motivated by ice cream. It’s a passion grand enough that he’s been known to plan outings to woodlands and prairies based on their proximity to certain ice cream parlors.

Besides his wife, Marie, no one knows this better than Linda Masters, a restoration ecologist for Elmhurst’s Conservation Design Forum who has worked alongside Swink collecting specimens in the field.

"In 1986 we spent hours, days together,’’ recalls Masters. "I would drive the van and Floyd would navigate. He would have his binoculars out. He would plan our daylong field trip. First we would have coffee, and Floyd, a piece of toast. Then we would go look for plants, he having mapped a route of possible rare plants in bloom. And for every route planned that year, on it would be an ice cream stop," Masters says. "He took it in a cone.’’

A sneaking suspicion upon meeting Floyd Swink is that his signature flavor is vanilla; he can be found darting around his office at the Morton Arboretum in grass-stained white tennis shoes, cream colored trousers, beige cardigan sweater all topped off with a crop of white-gray hair.

Then there’s his energy. "Oh! There must be more than 1,000 trillium out here! Whooooaaaah!" He is as colorful as the birds he spies through the binoculars dangling from his neck or the bold-hued flora he so admires.

Referring to himself as a true "prairie man,’’ he is brilliant in his work and adamant about continuing to learn. Each day he adheres to a busy schedule at the Morton Arboretum where he’s taxonomist emeritus, a post he has held for the last four years.

Swink joined the Morton in 1960 to head its education program. But he also has been responsible for identifying 28,000 of the 40,000 woody plants on the grounds. What’s more, he co-authored Plants of the Chicago Region with friend and fellow botanist Gerould Wilhelm (Indiana Academy of Science, recently updated for its fourth edition).

Forever curious, and painfully honest, Swink, 77, says he’s recently discovered that he’s "been missing the real parts of nature. I mean the absolutely mind-boggling phases of nature," he says. Scouting the trees to follow the call of a red-winged blackbird, which he begins to imitate with his hands above his head, Swink gleefully calls out, "Can you imagine being able to do work like this for a living? Being outdoors looking at plants and birds?" Then he sort of hops up and down.

	Swink's flair for detail has helped make nature fun for thousands. Photo by Gary Irving.

This latest bout of wonder stems from a yearlong friendship with Laura Rericha, a Midwest bird expert. Together they have combed forests, marshes, and prairies, Swink teaching her about plants, Rericha adding to his already vast knowledge on birds. "All these years I’ve been collecting plants, and all around me was this great web of nature," Swink says. "Laura has taught me bird habits, flight speed, flight mechanisms, digestion complexities, and the insects they eat."

Likewise, he has taught Rericha, Masters, Wilhelm, and a host of others. Nor does he just teach nature; there are his sports stories, the multiple interconnections between English and Latin words, and puns.

"Oh my god! I can tell you my favorite [pun] right now,’’ laughs Rericha at the mention of Swink’s pun penchant. A Mallard duck went into a pharmacy, she recounts. The duck went to the counter, ordered a Chapstick, and told the pharmacist, "Go ahead and put it on my bill."

Let the record note that Swink is a man of unusual rituals. While he tells his life story, a sandwich, unwrapped, sits atop a file cabinet in his sparse office. "Oh, that? That’s my lunch," he explains. "Soon as I arrive in the morning I open it up so it dries in the air. I call it ‘toasting.’ By noon it will be perfect to eat."

Legendary, too, are his typing skills, developed as a young boy. Swink demonstrates how he can type 140 words per minute, feigning difficulty because his hands are chilly. The keys of the electric typewriter on his desk fly crazily from the speed, thwacking against the paper as a long paragraph is formed in seemingly a second! And he does it while doing other mental tricks.

"When I first met him he did it for me, keeping nickels perched on his knuckles, typing the capitals of the states in alphabetical order while he was reading a book upside down," Masters says.

Swink grew up in Villa Park during the Depression. One of four children, young Floyd often would hike with his father to the neighboring Arboretum, and it was while scouring its landscape that his interest in plants began.

Identification books in tow, Swink learned as much as possible on his own, never suspecting a career in botany might follow. Instead the spry, ambidextrous, sports-minded youth dreamed of a career in…baseball. On a drizzly Chicago morning before taking a lively birding hike combined with peeks at woodland wildflowers, Swink displays the talent that caught the eye of minor-league scouts more than five decades ago.

He throws imaginary balls into the air, first with his right arm, then with his left. "I played two positions, shortstop and pitching. What intrigued the scouts was that I pitched left-handed to lefties and right-handed to righties. As a shortstop, Swink was ideal because on a double play he would underhand to first with his left, something rare among ballplayers.

But instead of joining the minors, Swink joined the navy during World War II with hopes of seeing the world. He served his time in Chicago as a typist.

He did see the world, he says, but not as a sailor. Plants took him there. After finding a plant he couldn’t identify, he took it to the Field Museum’s botany department. The plant, blue hearts (Buchnera americana), changed the course of his life. Botanist Julian Steyermark identified both the plant and Swink as rare treasure.

At the Field, he became an apprentice under Steyermark, one of America’s best field botanists. He saw the globe through study of the Museum’s world-wide collection of herbarium specimens. Later, Swink spent seven years as an instructor for the University of Illinois and then became a naturalist with the Cook County Forest Preserve District. By 1960, he became head of education at Morton.

"Floyd Swink was instrumental in my life,’’ says Gerould Wilhelm, who began working with Swink at the Arboretum after returning from his own stint in the army in 1974. "I was in the Army Corps of Engineers. We were analyzing environmental impacts along the Des Plaines. Here came this botanist who knew more technical detail on plants than I’d ever thought possible." That brilliance inspired Wilhelm and so many others in the continuing culture of appreciation of the nature of Chicago Wilderness. Thank you, Floyd.