Kristin Arnold: This is Kristin Arnold, archivist at the
Sterling Morton Library at The Morton Arboretum. Today is
October 26, 2022. And I'm in the library conference room with Ed
Hedborn, manager of plant records, to discuss his memories
of the Collections Program during Ray Schulenberg's tenure
as curator, which lasted from 1977 to 1987. Thank you, Ed, for
agreeing to the recording of this interview. To start, can
you please state your first and last name and spell it for us?
Ed Hedborn: All right. Ed Hedborn H–E–D–B–O–R–N.
Kristin Arnold: Thank you. And then can you please tell us when
you first—when you became the Arboretum's plant recorder?
Ed Hedborn: I became the plant recorder in May of 1977.
Kristin Arnold: Great. So can you tell me about your early
days as plant recorder? Like what were your daily tasks or
responsibilities? Or were there any major projects that you were
working on?
Ed Hedborn: Probably the biggest project when I first started was
learning how to be the plant recorder. Because when I was
hired by Ray Schulenberg the Arboretum had not had a plant
recorder for over a year. So there was no continuity of
transition. And I actually worked with Walter Eickhorst for
three months before he retired and Ray took over.
And he sort of taught me how to—what the expectations were to
be a plant recorder. And basically, if you want to put it
in a simple sentence, it's to keep track of the life history
of any plant the Arboretum has ever grown, and get the
information to whoever needs it. So whether it's a staff person,
or an outside researcher, or a visitor.
Kristin Arnold: Does that involve going out into the field
a lot? To look at the plants? Was it more of a desk job?
What—I guess—what is—what did your day look like?
Ed Hedborn: I guess the short answer is yes, all of the above.
Initially, the plant recorder, took the inventory out in the
field. You went out with a clipboard and a typed set of
sheets of paper and checked what was on the paper against the
information you had on the label. And is the plant still
there? And sort of what condition was it in? And if it
was there, you put a checkmark, if it needed a new label, you
would make a little symbol of what type of label it needed,
whether it was a tree nail that would—tree label that was nailed
to the trunk, or there was a hanging label—hanging Tree
label, stake label. Depends on the growth form of the plant.
Then you would bring that sheet of—sheets of paper back into the
office, go into the card file system, pull the card file
system out. So you had the cards arranged in the order of the
inventory. You'd take them out, you would then type the
information on the card that the plant was there. If there was a
problem or something, and then you would take the cards and you
would hand—I'd hand them off—this system that evolved. I
would take the tray of cards and you'd hand them off to Ray
Schulenberg. And he would go through the cards and make
little notes or annotations in his copy of the Arboretum's
woody plant catalog. That was part of my responsibility as
well. And then he would take the cards and hand those off to
Floyd Swink, who was our—oh, how do I explain what Floyd did for
us? He essentially was our horticultural taxonomist. He was
our "all things plant guru" in identification, information
about collections plants. And then he would annotate his copy
of the catalog. Then I would get the tray of cards back and get
to file them back. Meanwhile, the handwritten sheet that I
did, was then given over to our—was our Collections Program
secretary at the time and that person would then type a clean
copy. The clean copy would go in one file cabinet. So this is
sort of the working—I mean, literally the—you could, you
could measure the inventory of the Arboretum in inches. So I
mean, literally, the three year inventory of the sheets put
back-to-back and compressed was probably about 10 inches thick
of paper. And that grew from the 1922 inventory, which was maybe
less than three quarters of an inch. So it shows you how much
the Arboretum has grown. The handwritten copies were then
filed in a different set of file cabinets. So quite literally,
plant records—up until we computerized—we had the written
inventories with little annotations in the clean copy in
one set of file cabinet drawers. We had inventories of what was
growing in propagation, in the various nurseries on the
grounds. We kept track of—in there, there's probably three or
four file cabinet drawers filled with plant orders, and receipts
and invoices of plants that the Arboretum has received from all
over the country or all over the world. Going—I go back to 1922
and find out the Arboretum got a box of plants shipped in a
railroad car from a nursery out east.
And then, you know, you get the—sort of the packing slip
that people had and they'd handwrite what the accession
number for the individual plant was.
Kristin Arnold: Interesting. So Ray Schulenberg became curator
of plant collections in 1977. And in a previous interview, you
had mentioned how he was really focused on wild-collected
plants. Can you explain or do you know why he did? Why—why he
put—placed such emphasis on wild seed collecting? Or were there
any factors, larger factors that influenced this—this view?
Ed Hedborn: Yeah, I mean, that's, I think putting my
interpretation—I—and to be honest, I haven't—it's been so
long since I read anything in The [Morton] Arboretum Quarterly
articles that Ray may have, have mentioned about the subject.
What I gather was, up until then, the Arboretum was building
out with plants they got from wherever they could get them. So
they would get seeds from other botanic gardens that maybe were
collected in the botanic garden. They would be getting plants
from nurseries, we would be getting cuttings from the Arnold
Arboretum. We actually sent our early propagators to the Arnold
Arboretum, or to other parts of the world. Occasionally, when we
were lucky, I guess. And we would get plants. If you know
anything about plants, getting seeds from a cultivated source
that's growing in a botanic garden, or another arboretum
with other plants of similar types, they're—the chance of you
getting true seed is less because plants hybridize. They
cross with one another. And sometimes while the parent plant
may be true, this kind of oak or this kind of crabapple, you grow
it from seed. It doesn't quite look like its parents. Whereas
if you then, I guess to finish answering your question, the
Arboretum's collections, even the geographic collections were
essentially planted with these from cultivated sources. They
maybe got white oak, but they got it from a commercial
nursery. No idea where they got it. So when Ray took over some
of the geographic collections, some of the botanical
collections or systematic collections, were beginning to
show their age. Trees had reached a certain size. They
maybe had some dieback. And as part of the—a reinvigorating
process that Ray was—conceived of, he said, "Let's go to the
source. Let's collect plants from the wild, that we know the
genetics are true. It really is that plant. Or we have a better
chance of getting true material and replacing garden-grown with
wild." Not sure how he arrived at that decision he had, he had
been involved with the prairie restoration [Schulenberg
Prairie] previously as both curator of the Herbarium,
working on the Plants of the Chicago Region where you were
working with wild-collected plants and the prairie
restoration, where he went around to native prairies trying
to get wild-collected seed from the Chicago region, and starting
the, what's now called the Schulenberg Prairie and savanna.
So as he, I think, worked through his career and got to a
point of where he saw the differences between cultivated
and wild material. And I think he actually saw the
shrinking—over his lifetime—of wild habitats, and he thought,
let's get the stuff from the source when we can, because some
of the plants may go, either may go extinct, or certainly go
extinct locally. And that may have been what led them to
emphasize, "Let's get it from wild," because up until then,
the emphasis at the Arboretum I think was more on horticulture.
And it—and I will admit, having lived through a number of
curators they all have their favorite plants or kind of
plant. So with Walter Eickhorst when I just worked with him for
three months, whereas he had been at the Arboretum since—I
don't know—
Kristin Arnold: The early days—
Ed Hedborn: Well, the early days but not 1922. That's
Clarence—Clarence Godshalk, but with probably the 1930s, the
early 1930s, he started as plant labeler and Walter ended up
being the head of the—essentially the equivalent
of curator. His emphasis was more—he liked lilacs. He liked
crabapples. And he wanted—he—that's why our lilac
and our crabapple collections got huge. And every time a new
crabapple cultivar came out, he tried to get specimen—same thing
with lilacs—from all over the world. I mean, literally, there
are hundreds, if not thousands of different cultivars of
lilacs. And Ray goes—Ray went, "We got all these crabapples,
but we don't have the original parent species. Let's see if we
can get those."
Kristin Arnold: So how did the Arboretum react overall to this
change in collections focus on—on wild-collected plants?
Ed Hedborn: I think it depends on who you talk to.
Kristin Arnold: Yeah, but in general—
Ed Hedborn: In general Ray sort of chuckled—I—he told me once
that he thought the number of people on the Arboretum were
worried that there would be a "sapbath." That Ray would come
in and clear-cut a collection or just be cutting down big
specimens to plant these new, new plants. And he didn't. There
was some of it, because he would—he would have Floyd Swink
go out and look at plants. And if a plant was not true to name,
we couldn't tell what it was. Or it was understock. Where you,
you graft a cultivar onto the roots of another plant. If that
top dies and the roots resprout. It's not what you wanted there,
why keep it? And there was a fair amount of that. So he
cleared that out that open space And as replacements we got
wild-collected plants—wild-collected stock. And
the way Ray initially went about it wasn't so much going on seed
collecting trips or big expensive expeditions. Many
institutions would offer a seed exchange list. They would
collect seeds from plants locally in their area and offer
them in exchange for seeds, or that we would collect locally
that were fairly common, but were uncommon for them, maybe in
a garden in Europe. So actually, in the, down in the basement of
the library, there's a whole series of seed catalogs from all
over the world. And these would come in the mail, Ray would look
at them, and there'd be this, usually two sections, big
section on seeds from cultivated plants, and then a much smaller
section on wild-collected seeds. And the information might have
been relatively sparse. We got it in this province, or we got
it in this county, you know, if it's a U.S. garden, we got in
this state, this county. That's about all the information we
would get. Now we get a lot more information, much more specific
as to where the plants come from. But it was, I guess, the,
the horticultural or botanic garden equivalent of baseball
trading cards. I got this cool card, you know, what, what will
you give? And it wasn't the, "What will you give me for it?"
We would send it, we would offer it, people would take it, and
then we'd look at their list, get and we'd just ship—ship
seeds back and forth. Pot them up, run them through our
greenhouse propagation system. Wait. Sometimes they germinated.
Sometimes they didn't. You know, the luck of the draw. And then
once they were big enough, put them out on the grounds. So
while Ray may have started this process in the, in the late
1970s, in '77, it probably wasn't until early or mid 1980s
that this revitalization of collections really got rolling.
Kristin Arnold: OK. And so I'm—you touched on this a bit.
So maybe, maybe there's not much more to say on it. But how—how
did this focus on wild-collected plants affect either existing
collections or new collections? Like did it inspire different
collections to be planted? Or—you did talk about
revitalizing some of the collections.
Ed Hedborn: He revitalized—I mean, he looked at existing
collections—excuse me [coughs]. He revitalized existing
collection our—our Europe Collection. You may have—he
started working with wild-collected crabapples
species. You're—got plants from Kor—Korea, from Europe, Japan.
He did a lot of seed exchange with gardens in the Soviet Union
at the time [coughs]. And as he went along, he realized the
existing collections may not have enough area to put all the
plants you wanted to put in them or they didn't fit there
exactly. So we had a Europe, we had our—our geographic
collections were European, either big Europe Collection,
which is over on the West Side of the Arboretum now and we had
a Balkan Collection, Eastern U.S. wetlands, Ja—Japan, China
and Central West Asia and Korea. And he looked at me, he goes,
"Well, what's missing?" U.S. collections. I mean, we had an
Appalachian Collection, but it was really small. And that was
it. So he said, "Let's look at sort of the Western United
States, the Rocky Mountains, Pacific Northwest." And he
conceptualized a Pacific Northwest Collection, Rocky
Mountain, a Great Plains Collection and a Southwest
Collection and he sited those over in what's now Sargent's
Glade. So went from Pacific Northwest was actually down in
what used to be called—as I found out—the Cool Garden, which
was in a little ravine along Joy Path that had hemlocks, was a
little shadier, a little more protected. And he thought
Pacific Northwest plants might do well there. And then the
Rocky Mountains were sort of in the north edge of—northern part
of Sargent's Glade. The Plains was a series of beds in the
central part of Sargent's Glade and then the Southwest plant
collection was a series of beds with some modified soil to give
much better drainage that was at the south end. And those are the
beds that still exist that you can see from—on the east side of
Lake Marmo. Of all the collections the Southwest did
the best and the Pacific Northwest, Rockies, and Great
Plains did not fare well. Apparently the plants did not
like our hot, humid or dry summers and the spring wetness
in clay soils was didn't work well. He did add to the
Appalachian Collections, but that really started to expand
under Matt Lobdell. The other collection Ray started was the
Northern Illinois Collection. And it's in that area just right
around and just past Parking Two. And that was let's collect
seeds from anywhere in the northern half of Illinois, and
he literally figured out what the northern half of Illinois
would be. And you couldn't cross the county line to get a plant
that was cool on that side—and there's plants over—no, that's a
different county, we got to stay this side. So he had his his
ideas and he stuck to them. He—he had sort of a—I guess
you'd call it a pure concept of a this, this collection. What's
Midwest? You know, what's Northern Illinois? What's the
boundaries of Illinois north of
this parallel, just like the Chicago area was defined. You
scribed an arc and any county that had more than 50% of its
area within the arc was part of the Chicago region. If it was
51% out, it didn't make it. So we, you know. Unfortunately,
there aren't too many bot—botanic gardens or arboreta
in the northern half of Illinois. And that's where some
of the seed ex—seed collecting trips that I was involved in,
gotten in and then I actually got involved in two of the seed
collecting trips that went out to the Rockies—through the Rocky
Mountains. Never got to the Pacific Northwest. That was
somebody else that got out there.
Kristin Arnold: So that was actually going to be my next
question was if you could tell us about your seed collecting
trips. So you said you did some in Northern Illinois and then—?
Ed Hedborn: The first trips were in—in—through the Rockies and
Pacific Northwest. I think the first one might have been to the
Pacific Northwest '70—'70—might have been even '78-'79—somewhere
in there. Ray went out and they hit, you know, the Cascades, the
Olympics, that Washington/Oregon area collecting seeds. Came
back. Some of them grew. We could get them to germinate fine
in the greenhouse, but you put them out in the grounds they
just sort of, I don't like it here and decide, nope. Going to
the great habitat in the sky. And then in the—the way
actually, the way Ray prepared for a seed exchange or a seed
collecting trip was very interesting. If he had contacts,
you know, there was a garden or he would contact rangers in a
particular park that he wanted to go to. If we were going
through Yellowstone, he contacted the National Park
Service rangers there to get permission. If we were going
through a reservation, and he thought he knew of plants there
that he wanted, he contacted the tribal council to see if he
could get permission to. And he usually did. And, you know,
county parks, county roadsides were just fair game.
Kristin Arnold: Yeah.
Ed Hedborn: You know, areas along railroads, and you
couldn't do the kind of seed collecting now that we did,
then, if you started walking along a railroad looking for,
for plants: A, they've gone from burning from the side of the
railroad, either with flame or with cinders, from steam
engines, to herbicides, which wipes everything out. Or, as
you're walking on the railroad, you know, Homeland Security come
up and arrest you for, you know, think you're plotting sabotage
or something. So there's, you've got to be a little more
circumspect in, punch all the right little buttons to get
permissions to do stuff. But in preparation, he'd get U.S.
Forest Service maps for whatever the national forest was. He
would get county—county, what he called county maps. They
literally were a map of the county with the entire road
system. Well, it'd have the road system, but it'd also have
cemeteries. And if there was a cemetery out in next to a creek
or something, boy you, you would go to that cemetery. And there
might be native plants there. I remember, we hit a cemetery
down, I think in Sangamon County, just the edge of
Northern Illinois. And there were some of the most massive
gorgeous black walnuts you've ever seen. I mean, they
literally were like three and a half, four foot trunk diameter,
you just look up. And it's 80 feet to the first branch. And
walnuts are falling. So it's like you get in there and we
walked out with one of those old manila shopping bags filled with
walnuts. Other times you would, you would go, you'd find a patch
of paw paw somewhere. And you'd snag paw paws, and you'd come
back with a giant and you'd come back from a seed collecting trip
if one of these big ones out west and the van would just be
fragrant with foliage. We were collecting pine so that it was
very eclectic—eclectic potpourri.
Kristin Arnold: That sounds really interesting. So I'm going
to change gears a little bit. So I understand that there was a
lot of effort in the late '70s and into the '80s to move
collections closer to the Visitor Center. So could you
describe what the purpose of that was? Or the process? I
mean, what was it like to move collections?
Ed Hedborn: I don't think it was physically move the collection,
like we're gonna move the Maple Collection from—and that's the
wrong example. Because they actually start—because the Maple
Collection, where it is now, was actually the second spot for the
Maple Collection. The original Maple Collection was just east
of the Appalachian Collection right where that first return
loop—road loop is. In 1936 we got new property.
Kristin Arnold: OK.
Ed Hedborn: So they took cuttings, they got new maples,
they moved the Maple Collection to the site where it is now. In
that timeframe, you're talking about where let's consolidate,
let's, let's have sort of a central activity area. At the
time the Arboretum had, like 19 miles of road, lot of trails,
let's bring the activity to the middle. Let's—and I think some
of it was let's let the woods and some of the natural areas
sort of recover and come back. I think Ray was looking at it as,
let's keep the native woodlands native rather than pushing
collected collections into it. Whereas other people were
looking, we can get people in to the central area. They can come
in, they can do their activities here, it's easier for a smaller
staff to service this. Everything in a small area. You
could almost—over time the Arboretum has been like a
living, well, it is a living organism, you know, it expands,
it contracts, it breathes in, it breathes out. And it's like this
was one of those let's, you know, breathe in and bring
things in close. And then it was like, oh, let's move stuff back
out. Because there are too many, too many people here. Let's get,
you know, there are too many people underfoot. Let's move
them out into the rest of the grounds. And there were plans to
have new gardens, new events, and it's—hadn't quite gotten to
the, the real big planning stage there were a couple of rough
drawings, redesigning Meadow Lake, maybe a new Visitor
Center, at least conceptually, not so much. It was bringing
stuff from the West Side in bringing—they actually brought
the maples into the area just south of the little Japanese
[Collection] oxbow. It's on the East Side. Started to make a new
maple collection there. And the next couple of curators decided,
no, let's move things back to where they were. And they
removed the North American or the non-Chinese or Asian plants
out of that new area and decided to expand China Collection. So
it was a thought experiment. We tried moving stuff so it
wasn't—I think they saw it wasn't working well. Things
expanded and, you know, Ray left, I think, or Ray retired.
Tony Tyznik retired. Dr. [Gerard] Donnelly came in there
was a different conceptualization, I guess, of
what, what the mission of the Arboretum was. It was kind of
interesting. This is beyond Ray. Listening to—I knew Clar—met,
talked with Clarence Godshalk, you know, Walter Eickhorst, sort
of those two people were instrumental in actually
building the Arboretum under Mr. Morton. So it was like they were
taking his ideas and concepts and making them concrete. Let's
build the Arboretum. Fill things out. Let's get the plants in the
ground because Mr. Morton was in his 60s or 70s. And he wanted to
see an arboretum in his lifetime.
Then Walter was curator. And then when he retired and Ray—it
was sort of a reevaluation, let's go from horticulture to
wild-collected. And Dr. [Marion T.] Hall, well, Clarence did
that. And then he started the prairie restoration. Sort of saw
the—started to channel the Arboretum into ecology and
ecological aspects. And he and Clarence started the education
program. Dr. Hall was brought on, on board to essentially
build and create a research program. So he built on top of
what Clarence and Dr. Hall did. And then as Dr. Donnelly and Dr.
Hall brought the Arboretum up to probably the best, well,
second—no, no the best arboretum I would say in the Midwest. Had
a real good solid, midwestern or even national reputation. And
then Dr. Donnelly came on board and built on that, and just
expanded, you know, membership and visitors and reinvigorating
the grounds in the Arboretum, he lifted the Arboretum up to
international standing. But none of those could—none of those
people could have done what they did without the steps done by
people before, before them.
Kristin Arnold: Yeah, of course.
Ed Hedborn: And it all traces back to a dream of Mr. Morton.
Kristin Arnold: So I'm going to—I'm going to go back a little
bit. I know you mentioned a couple different collections
that Ray either revitalized or planted like the Northern
Illinois Collection, but were there any other collections that
we haven't talked about that he worked on or had planted during
his time as curator?
Ed Hedborn: He, he worked on the Birch Collection, getting
birches from all over the world. Some of our collecting trips,
were getting birches from North—various parts of North
America. He worked with oaks, he would, he would, he collected
maples, he was, I think, eclectic in his collecting. If
it had seeds on it, we're gonna get it and try it.
Kristin Arnold: Yeah.
Ed Hedborn: So on some of the, some of, the two western seed
exchange trips that, that I was involved with, we did 6000 plus
miles in two weeks. We would be up before dawn, have the van
packed, checked out of a motel and be waiting at—in the parking
lot for the local cafe to open for breakfast. Had breakfast,
out on the road, as soon as it was daylight. You saw—Ray was
scanning the roadside. You know, we would be heading from
wherever we stayed to, you know, a national forest or a county
park or someplace that, that he had thought of. But as we're
going down a road, it's like there's a [prairie?], you know,
there's a grove of trees, let's stop and look and see if there
are acorns. There were a couple of times that I would see
something and hit the brakes and you know, Ray would [pretends to
hit dashboard of vehicle] hands would go out onto the dashboard
and he, "What?" [inaudible] "This plant over there. It's
kind of interesting." And I remember Ray looking at me once
he goes, "You drive, me botanize." But, you know, we
work back and forth. And I find it was fun. He was a mentor,
taught me plants along with, with Floyd Swink. And not just
plants, but partly ecology. How to see and view things. I guess
the difference between looking at something and really seeing
it. So it's subtle pattern recognition. It's like how do
you—how do you—how do you know that's a bur oak from three
miles away? And it's like, when when people asked me that, it's
like, you can walk into one of these big box stores. And you
can hear somebody's voice three hours—three, three aisles over
or you can see some—you know, a family member walking away from
you. And you know who it is.
Kristin Arnold: Yeah.
Ed Hedborn: But if I asked you, how do you know that? You'd have
a hard time putting that in words and he just knew that. He
called it Gestalt botany, you just look at the plant. You
know, identify it when you can. Take a key, you key it out. When
you can, when it's got flowers or fruit on it. And then you
look at that plant in all kinds of weather. In all the seasons,
sunny days, cloudy days, rainy days. Look at the bark, see what
color the bark looks like in different light or moisture. And
pretty soon it's like, oh, quarter mile that's, that's bur
oak or that, that's, you know, silver maple or that doesn't
look right. That's something Let's go over and look at that,
because it doesn't match that pattern you built up in your, in
your mind that you've become familiar with.
Kristin Arnold: That's amazing. I'm going to change course a
little bit again. So I read an issue, in a [The Morton
Arboretum] Quarterly article that Schulenberg wrote. He
talked about how a lot of the early landscape plantings
weren't recorded simply because they were just planting at a
rapid pace. They didn't have a huge staff, they just they just
couldn't record everything. And my understanding is that one of
your first tasks, or maybe one of your early tasks, I should
say, was to trace the history of some of those really early
landscape plants. And so I was really curious what that process
was like and how you went about that?
Ed Hedborn: Well, some of it is, when I was doing inventory, the
original inventories just covered what they had accession
numbers and labels on. So you go and then I was noticing, well,
here's this tree, but 300 feet away is the next plant. And
there's this plot of Norway spruce or other plants that were
obviously planted. There are no records on it. So it's like,
where do you find information to fill in those gaps? Because
they're part of the landscape. People ask questions about them.
Where did they come from? You know, when were they planted?
How big are they? And as you said, early on in the 19—, well,
1922—oh, was it well over 200,000 trees were planted in
one year and talking to Walter and Clarence Godshalk, who said,
yeah, the plants were coming in, you're digging, you're planting,
you're planting, you're planting. And then you were
doing the records in the winter or when it was raining. And if
it got to be planting season, the next year, you went out and
started planting the next, you know, 200,000—100,000 trees or
shrubs that came in. Because Mr. Morton wanted his arboretum, and
some stuff just got lost. Because they didn't have time or
the people to do that, what we consider now, critical data
capture. Who did we get it from? Where did we get it? When? How
many did we get? Kind of, kind of the who, what, when, where,
why. And then keeping track of it, I don't know what you know,
or they knew where those plants came because they planted them.
And they remembered what nursery, but they just didn't
write it down. But because they kept purchase orders in a file,
they kept nursery inventories, they actually kept planting
lists. So you'd have the inventory, and they go through
or the curator would go through and make a, made a typed list of
what plants went where on the grounds. So that list was handed
off to the horticulturist. And they would take that, pick the
plants up out of the nursery, put them in the ground, check
them off as being planted. And then hand them back to plant
records. Well, if they didn't have time, they just got filed.
So it's going back through some of those old records. All of a
sudden, it's like, oh, that's when those plants—or a tree
would come down. I'd get a section and I'd count tree rings
back. Oh, you know, it, it—two and a half feet up where I got
that section. That plant was X number of years old. So it
probably went into the ground in 1925. So then I go back to 1925
and start looking through some of these records. Sometimes you
couldn't figure out where they came from. And that's where you
will run into labels with a number, a dash, and a U. And the
U signifies "unknown." We've looked, we just don't know where
those came from. And it's, I guess it's kind of plant
detective work that I kind of like doing.
Kristin Arnold: Yeah.
Ed Hedborn: And I guess you know, you working in a library.
It's the same thing. Somebody comes in and says I need this
piece of information and you immediately start thinking
of—what are the key—now, what are the keywords I can type in
that will give me the information that can answer that
question. In the past it was, what are the keywords that are
in that card file? That's my fingers doing the walk and then
go over and start pulling books down to see if you can find it,
find the information. That's what it was, it was back in the
old pull, paper—the hardcopy records out and see if I can
match.
Kristin Arnold: Yeah. So speaking of development of
technology, I also wanted to ask you about the computerization of
the plant records. Just what was that whole process like? And
what started that process?
Ed Hedborn: Well, I think what started it was the curator of
the Herbarium at the time had gotten a new—one of the new
Microsoft tabletop things and just started putting records.
Put the date in and—and Charles Lewis, who was the head of
Collections at the time, myself, and Ray Schulenberg, sort of
went around and around and we realized, just throwing data in
was not going to give us a good result. So we needed—we knew we
needed help. And we reached out to a variety of places. We
looked—wow, I think we looked at an IBM store. Then when IBM was
selling computers. We looked at a variety of places. And then we
tried a relatively unknown consultant. And he came in and
gave us a presentation. And he said, "I gave you a presentation
based on this software or this piece of equipment. But in
reality, what you really need is this." And we liked his honesty,
of he gave the presentation he was brought in to do, recognized
it wouldn't work for us, but said, this alternative you
really should look at. And we ended up hiring him, getting a
couple of grants. And he taught us about system analysis. And it
was what is the information you are currently keeping? What
are—what's the information you would like to keep? What's the
growth rate? How do you capture the information? What are the
reports, you get it out? And then you'd look at it, you'd
break this, all that information down to what's the smallest
usable piece and that became your fields. And then you'd look
at the fields and which fields relate to each other? Do those
fields belong in sort of a grouping about the plant name?
The—this group of fields revolve around the accession number,
does this revolve around the plant? How do you keep track of
the life history of the plant? And that ended up telling us
what files or tables the data went into. And with the
consultant, we went through this. It took us three years to
do this process. And then he built it. He designed the
database [coughs]. Excuse me. And then Floyd Swink—in addition
to being the wiz at identifying plants—was a, I guess you'd call
it a world class speed typist. He could jam—he could type
faster than any electric typewriter could type. They
actually had—the Arboretum actually bought him a typewriter
and souped it up so he, he still would jam it but he didn't jam
it up as often. He used to sell typewriters before he went—Floyd
was amazing. He had a—he just graduated from high school, no
college. Everything else was self taught. Yeah, he—he was
typing. They found out—in World War II, he went in for the draft
to, to the entrance examining station in Chicago. And they
found out how fast he could type. And he never left the
building during World War II. Was the way Floyd phrased it, he
just did paperwork the whole time. Because, I mean, it
sounded like machine gun, it was like [typewriter sound]. And
each one of those [typewriter sound] was a whole line of type.
But Floyd, went through the card file, and typed a formatted
paper catalog.
And then our consultant scanned that into OCR—Optical Character
Recognition—scanned it onto one inch reel to reel tape on the
old IBM computers, they ran it into the database, we looked at
it, we got printouts, then you were proofing for a year. You're
finding the zeros that are supposed to be an O, the O
that's supposed to be a zero. An @ instead of an a, an L for a
one, an S for a five—all the permutations you can think of.
And then you go, this data actually belongs in this field.
And we do it all over again. So we finally got it up to where we
went live in December of 1985. With our first computer system,
and that changed a lot because you're, you can't get away from
carrying a clipboard with paper out in the field, checking stuff
off, coming in, but then you're instead of pulling cards up,
you're pulling a computer record, typing it in. And you
don't have to refile it. And as soon as you do that, everybody
had access to the data. And then we could print out a catalog.
Some of us were old school, we liked that paper catalog instead
of looking it up [coughs] like that paper catalog. But it eased
things. And all of a sudden the Collections secretary didn't
have this 10 inches of paper to type of inventory. So that freed
that person up to do a wide variety of things, freed us all
up to do other bits and pieces.
Kristin Arnold: Did you have much computer experience before?
Ed Hedborn: Not—1985. They just barely invented the personal
computer. So you know, didn't know it at all. And then over
time, our consultant, who was the programmer, showed me how to
program. So over—it—I, the way I phrased it, it's like a home
mortgage. When you first do it, all of the interest goes to the
bank, you know, and over time you go down to where the home is
yours. It was the same way. Initially, the consultant did
the programming and everything and as his involvement went
down, he taught me and then we crossed to where I was doing
most of the typing and tweaking and if I had a problem I'd give
him a phone call. And then with the next curator that we'll I
think go into with Kunso [Kim], the, they went around and around
and we decided we needed to move to a different database system
which we ended up with, with BRAHMS [Botanical Research And
Herbarium Management System] and I don't know the programming on
that. So we're relying on Oxford University in England to do that
for us.
Kristin Arnold: That's really fascinating. So were there any
other like large projects or events that happened during
Ray's time as curator that we haven't discussed yet?
Ed Hedborn: I think yeah, it was—Ray was still curator. I
got—this is when I got ro—initially got roped into sort
of Bloom and Color Reports. Because I would—one of those
people that's always out in the grounds ,you know, you're
checking plants, you're doing inventories. And then people
would ask me, you know, "What's—what's in bloom? What's
a place—?", you know, somebody at the gatehouse or at the
Visitor Center would ask me, "Where can I send people to look
at pretty plants?" And then I started formalizing it a little
later, where I actually would take a drive or a walk around,
and then that built to—at one point I had—25 or 30 volunteers
going around, recording, and then we would—and another group
of volunteers who were putting that information into the
computer system.
Kristin Arnold: So you just—you got the job, because you were
already out in the field.
Ed Hedborn: I was out in the field, it was something nobody
was doing.
Kristin Arnold: And there was a need.
Ed Hedborn: I saw a need and it's one of those you know, you
look at your, your job description at the bottom line
and other duties as assigned. It was also other duties that you
seem to dream up on your own.
Kristin Arnold: That's cool. I didn't think to ask about that.
So it's, it's neat to hear how that came about. Well, thank you
very much for your time, Ed, and for sharing your experiences.
It's really, really fascinating to hear about what the Arboretum
Collections Program was like at that time, and I've enjoyed
hearing about it.
Ed Hedborn: I enjoyed reliving some of it.