When Floyd Swink was 4 years old, his brother Clyde taught him to type. Within a few years, his small fingers could fly at more than 100 words per minute, without error, despite the manual typewriter’s stiff keys.
He was 9 when the great stock market crash occurred in 1929. “My dad lost every penny and his job,” Swink said. To help support the family, Floyd took a job demonstrating typewriters for L.C. Smith and Corona Typewriter Co. in downtown Chicago. “They put me in a window. I could look out and see 20 people pressing their noses against the plate glass while I typed,” Swink said with a chuckle.
His dexterous digits have been put to good use in the nearly seven decades since then. The 77-year-old Wheaton resident is renowned as an author of and contributor to numerous books and scientific journals on plant identification and botany, including the fourth edition of “Plants of the Chicago Region,” a 921-page tome coauthored with ecologist Gerould Wilhelm of Glen Ellyn in 1994.
“`Plants of the Chicago Region’ has been an immense aid, and his presentations are always great,” said Bill Glass, natural heritage biologist at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie near Joliet. “He has a unique perspective of things, whether it’s science in general or plants and animals.”
An educator and scientist, Swink holds the title of taxonomist (plant classification expert) emeritus at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle. The title is a good fit for a man recognized by his peers and by generations of students as an icon in the Midwest’s conservation movement.
“Floyd has been the pivotal figure that changed the scene of natural areas, science and ecological restoration in the Chicago area,” said Tom Simpson of Libertyville, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Programs at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. “If you go back to the 1950s, he was really the genius in the environmental movement and natural areas conservation. He helped create the love of prairies.”
“As a record of flora of the region, `Plants of the Chicago Region’ is invaluable in terms of history, how the region is changing, being destroyed,” said Tom Antonio of Chicago, research taxonomist at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe. “He has a visual record of the area in his mind.”
“His `Plants of the Chicago Region’ proves to be much sought after and much used,” said Michael Stieber of Batavia, Morton Arboretum’s library administrator.
“We use his book like it’s the bible. It comes every day to work with me,” said Laura Rericha of Mokena, seasonal naturalist for the Cook County Forest Preserve at Camp Sagawau in Lemont.
“I’ve gone on flower identification walks with him,” said Rita Hassert of Wheaton, Morton Arboretum’s reference librarian, “and he knows not only the plant names but the folklore. He has a very holistic approach to teaching, and he’s able to make science understandable.”
Intimately familiar with thousands of North American plants and many more from the tropics and elsewhere, Swink frequently is called upon for lectures, field trips and consultations.
“He’s got this tremendous memory,” said Marcia Rosenthal of LaGrange, an arboretum volunteer. “You mention a plant, and he will immediately tell you where the plants grew, what the habitat looked like, what the plants looked like and the exact spelling (of the plant’s Latin name).”
An authority on poisonous plants, Swink often is consulted by doctors and staff at local poison control centers when people, usually children, have ingested possibly life-threatening berries, leaves and seeds of unknown origin. “One of the most memorable things has been helping to save lives, helping doctors,” Swink said of his 46 years dealing with plant poisoning inquiries.
Once Swink is able to identify the plant species (sometimes in person, sometimes over the phone), the doctors can take action. “July through September is the main time the calls come in because that’s when children are attracted to eating showy fruits and seeds,” Swink explained. The most commonly ingested poisonous plant, he said, is the berry of the bittersweet nightshade. Among the most unusual cases he has encountered involved a rattle from Jamaica that was filled with poisonous rosary pea seeds. When the rattle broke, the seeds went directly into the mouth of the child.
He taught future physicians and pharmacists about medicinal plants from 1949 to 1955 at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and he has garnered numerous awards highlighting his achievements as a botanist. The most intriguing and remarkable aspect of Swink’s long career is that he never completed his undergraduate degree, although he took courses at the University of Illinois. He became Dr. Floyd Swink in 1995 when Western Illinois University presented him with an honorary doctorate.
Swink’s interest in plants began while attending York High School in Elmhurst. “I read a book called `Exploring for Plants’ by David Fairchild,” Swink said. “He wrote in a style that was for the beginner, in a popular style that was appealing.”
Born and raised with three older brothers in Villa Park, Swink’s interest in plants grew to a passion after high school, when his brother Clarence, an avid photographer, began using Kodachrome, a newly developed slide film.
“You could photograph a yellow flower and it turned out yellow,” Swink said. “The problem was, (Clarence) didn’t recognize some of the flowers he photographed, so he bought a book, `Field, Forest and Garden Botany,’ for 10 cents. That helped us identify a lot.”
The two brothers traveled on weekends by streetcar, train and bus to investigate natural areas. “At one place in Gary, there were cranberries, wild flax, grass pink orchids, ladies’ tresses orchids, Indian paintbrush and sundews — insect-catching plants,” Swink said. “It was rather rare. Many of these treasures (natural areas) are gone forever, leveled by mills and huge industrial complexes.”
In the 1940s, Swink demonstrated typewriters for sale to local schools, and he served in the Navy in a Chicago recruiting station during World War II. Married in 1944, he and his wife, Marie, have three children, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild on the way.
“All this time I was studying plants,” Swink said. He went to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in 1946 to seek help identifying a plant he found in the Indiana dunes. There he met Julian Steyermark, an expert on the world’s flora and curator of the museum’s herbarium. The two hit it off, and for the next 13 years, Steyermark took Swink under his wing, training him in botany.
Swink had a 24-hour pass to the museum. “I never stayed after 1 a.m.,” he said with a chuckle. He spent many evenings after work and Saturdays from 8 a.m. until midnight studying plants in the museum’s herbarium.
Steyermark, who died in 1989, would drill Swink on plants, their botanical classifications, what region they were from, their characteristics and uses, especially while on their weekend trips to study unique plant species found in Missouri. “He would quiz me endlessly, every second of the entire six-hour car ride,” Swink said. “There’s nobody left like him. He was the greatest (botanist) in the world, and nobody’s ever come close.”
Swink made a list of 6,000 groups of plants that he could study while commuting to work from his Chicago home. “I’d refresh my memory for 40 to 60 plants at a time. It was like a series of compound flash cards,” Swink said.
The University of Illinois College of Pharmacy in 1949 invited Swink to teach botany, zoology, pharmacognosy (study of medicinal products of plants, animals and minerals in their unprepared state) and entomology. “There were drugs made from powdered plants back then. Now they’re synthesized in the laboratory,” Swink said.
When the Austrian botanist Friedrich Ehrendorfer visited the Field Museum in 1952, Steyermark asked Swink to take him on a field trip. Ehrendorfer was so impressed by Swink’s knowledge that he told other botanists at the Field that there was no one like Swink in Europe.
Swink’s botanical expertise drew the attention of the Cook County Forest Preserve District in 1957, and he was given a position as naturalist at the Little Red Schoolhouse in Willow Springs. “They wanted someone to go the schools and lecture, to take students out to the woods and show them spring beauties (common wildflowers) and not get bored with it,” Swink said. “You see, a lot of the naturalists after the 25th trip (looking at the same plants) get bored.” Why doesn’t he get bored? “Natural history is fascinating,” he said. “The more you learn, the less you are bored.”
Swink interviewed for the job of director of education in 1960 with Clarence Godschalk, Morton Arboretum’s director at the time. “He told me that I’d meet with the trustees,” Swink said. But to his surprise, the meeting was a banquet at the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago. Only small talk was exchanged during the meal, so as he was leaving, Swink inquired about his job application. “A trustee said, `Oh, you’ve got the job. Start any time,’ ” Swink said.
Swink headed the arboretum’s education department for three years and became the taxonomist in 1963, a position he held until 1996. During that time, Swink catalogued and tagged tens of thousands of the arboretum’s plants, taught classes and, like Steyermark, served as mentor to countless botanists and naturalists.
Ken Klick of Lake Villa is a restoration ecologist with the Lake County Forest Preserve District in Libertyville. As a high school botany student in 1973, Klick visited Swink at the arboretum. “I was in awe when he’d take the time to talk to me,” Klick said. “No matter what your level of interest, he’d keep you going and not talk down to you.”
Although officially retired, Swink has an office at the arboretum, where he often begins work at 6:30 a.m. and has no plans to stop. “Retire?” said Swink, whose calendar is filled with upcoming lectures and field trips. “Have you ever seen people who’ve retired to Florida? You sit on the beach for five days, and it’s boring.”
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Swink will be teaching the “Natural History of Summer” at Morton Arboretum June 16-18 from 9:30 a.m. to noon. For more information, call 630-719-2468.
