[This week, we bring you a special FEATURE LENGTH article on an amazing encyclopedia collection!]

The closing of a spring semester evokes a new persona in typical study-crazed college students.  Before attempting to successfully complete course finals while sleep deprived or participating in annual commencement ceremonies, students may catch themselves savoring an over-priced coffee shop pastry while taking in the sights and sounds of nature during the spring season.  Although most people may figuratively approach the statement, “taking in the sights of nature in the spring time,” others choose to enjoy nature in a more literal context.

As an undergraduate student at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, Dr. Stanley Roux demonstrated a true, literal appreciation of nature.  Instead of enjoying a carbohydrate-loaded blueberry muffin along with the sights of spring’s seasonal blooms, Dr. Roux preferred the taste of something a little more exotic – passion flower fruit.

Today, you will not find Dr. Roux in Alabama customizing his taste palate for the local college landscape, but you will catch him in the biological laboratories building at The University of Texas at Austin with the same, if not more, enthusiasm for plants.

Dr. Roux dedicates much of his time to researching plant response to stimuli, such as gravity and light, and lecturing a diverse student population on the science of plant physiology.  However, when he is not in the lab or the classroom, Dr. Roux serves as a board member for a project aiming to bring society a little closer to the plants that once sustained our communities.

The Useful Wild Plants Project maintains a conservation-based position to study the use of plants throughout the world.  Through exploration of 4,000 different species of wild and naturalized plants inhabiting the eleven different regions of the Texas landscape, Useful Wild Plants, Inc., documents Texas’s very own botanical resources in a detailed series of encyclopedias.

The multi-volume work, entitled The Useful Wild Plants of Texas, the Southeastern and Southwestern United States, the Southern Plains, and Northern Mexico, provides a hands-on resource for every plant fanatic, natural history enthusiast and botanical archeology buff, no matter where they live.  A surprisingly fascinating read, the encyclopedia is as much about human history as it is about plants.

Useful Wild Plants, headed by Scooter Cheatham and Lynn Marshall, originally began as a scheme to avoid a research paper in Cheatham’s college archeology class.  According to Cheatham, he and a friend convinced the professor to allow them to complete an experiment in which they would travel to his grandmother’s ranch on the Guadalupe River and live on the land’s natural resources in order to grasp a better understanding of pre-modern human society.

During his experiment, Cheatham discovered that almost all of the tools and food needed for survival thrived within one kingdom, Plantae; thus, upon conclusion of a week in the wild, Cheatham set out to locate an unified information source about wild plants, but much to his dismay, no such resource existed.  From this inadequate supply of scientific information on plants emerged the Useful Wild Plants Project.

Many years later, with some help from a few trustworthy colleagues, Scooter Cheatham has successfully provided plant enthusiasts worldwide with accurate resources detailing wild plants and their wide array of uses in the encyclopedia collection, The Useful Wild Plants of Texas, the Southeastern and Southwestern United States, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico.  Together, Scooter Cheatham, Lynn Marshall, and Marshall Johnston have written and published three of fifteen volumes that will comprise the collection, in which each encyclopedia gives scientific data and cultural uses for each plant species.

Volumes 1-3 include 650 wild plant species, ranging from genera Abronia to genera Celtis, with volume four currently a work in progress.

As the world becomes more reliant on technology, Useful Wild Plants, Inc., aims to promote the conservation and the usage of these beneficial natural resources in everyday life. Through support of board members like Dr. Roux, trustees, and individuals eager to learn about wild plants, Useful Wild Plants continues its project, while expanding the knowledge base of wild plants and providing a unique resource that offers a natural alternative to a technical lifestyle.

To learn more about Useful Wild Plants Inc., please visit their website, http://www.usefulwildplants.org/index.htm.

Want to help support the effort to collect and provide this valuable information?  Queries concerning donations should be directed to info@usefulwildplants.org.