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Mays: ‘shamefully ignored’ natives

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By Alma Gaul | Friday, January 18, 2008 |

Dan Mays’ interest in native plants goes way beyond planting them in his yard.

Locating them in the wild, learning to identify them by sight, researching their different uses by pioneers and American Indians, and educating himself on propagation techniques so he can make more such plants has become a consuming passion.

It wasn’t always that way.

Mays, an electrician by trade, has been gardening for decades, picking up the interest from his grandmother, who was known for her flowers, and his parents, who farmed and maintained a vegetable garden. He also has been trained as a Scott County Master Gardener.

But he knew very little about native plants until about five years ago, when he encountered for the first time the term “rain garden” — a phrase used to describe an intentionally created depression in the ground that is planted with native species. Its purpose is to hold rainwater, allowing it to soak into the ground, preventing runoff.

Mays thought most of the rain gardens he saw looked weedy, so he began experimenting with “test gardens” in his new yard in Walcott, Iowa, and conducting research on native plants.

“I soon became embarrassed at my ignorance and began to immerse myself in study,” he says. “The more I learned, the more I realized just how much I didn’t know.”

In addition to reading, he began making trips into the countryside to find remnants of natives in their natural settings. They can still be found, “though in mostly small, isolated locations,” he says.

Prime locations are along railroad rights-of-way, in remote cliff areas that farmers couldn’t get to with a plow and in pioneer cemeteries. The hunt becomes exciting, and to see a plant previously viewed only in photos “is like a fairy tale before your eyes,” he says.

Mays takes photos of his finds, and then consults the Internet and field guides to try to identify them. One of the challenges is that most guides show plants in bloom. “Unless you happen to be on a field trip at precisely the right time when a plant is in bloom, it can be next to impossible to identify,” he says. But through dogged persistence, Mays can now identify many of the plants he admits he “shamefully ignored for 50 years.”

“I am reminded of the classic little book, ‘The Richest Man in Babylon,’ wherein a man traveled the world seeking riches only to discover that the riches he sought had been in his back yard the whole time.”

Because of his interest, Mays also has become dedicated to helping preserve and bolster the meager native flora populations that still exist, including those in the Rochester Cemetery in Cedar County.

The wealth of plants there leaves him awestruck.

“Rochester Cemetery, honest to God, it is one of the jewels of the world,” he says.

Alma Gaul can be contacted at (563) 383-2324 or agaul@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.