Spotlight: Nature's Beloved Son

John Muir may best be remembered as a pioneering environmentalist and founder of the Sierra Club, but he was first and foremost a botanist. He often carried a plant press on his wilderness treks, carefully preserving delicate flowers in situ. Other times he tucked leaves into the pages of his journal or stuffed clippings into his pockets. The plants he obsessively collected now serve as a record of his travels, and in 2003, the Muir historian Bonnie Gisel retraced his steps, recreating his herbarium based on the meticulous notebooks he left behind. On a high bluff in western North Carolina, Gisel plucked the small branch shown here, Leiophyllum buxifolium, or sand myrtle: "a charming shrub," as Muir described it on September 24, 1898. Together with Stephen Joseph, who photographed the newly preserved specimens, Gisel produced Nature's Beloved Son, a collection of 150 botanical images, photographs of Muir's personal artifacts, and pages from his notebooks.