The Book

Woody Plants of the Northern and Central Prairies

By
Walter T. Bagley & Richard K. Sutton
Illustrated by Nancy Scott

This was an ongoing project, worked on in evenings, after work and family obligations. It was put off sometimes, when the draw of the garden was stronger than the desire to stay inside and draw.

The opportunity to be involved in this project began when when I was working as an arborist (tree trimmer) for the city of Lincoln.

Dr. Walter Bagley, who had been my professor for an evening class on tree identification, gave me a call one evening. He remembered my taking his class a couple years before.

At the time, I was taking only one class after work and had time to sit and draw the specimens in the section on the herbarium sheets (pages that we had to fill out giving a description of each plant sample we had collected for the class), unlike all the younger college students who were taking a full load of classes.

Over the years I worked at various companies, and was always keeping my eyes out for plants I had not yet drawn.

The ideal was to have a winter twig, leaf, flower and fruit. The different parts had to be taken at different times of the year and then combined to make a complete drawing.

I was always taking home small clippings of plants and filling the refrigerator with specimens, which my husband absolutely hated.

Sometimes I was overly exuberant and enthusiastic in collecting material and didn't get to it for a while, or not at all. The result of good intentions became moldy, requiring disposal before it even got drawn.

The drawings were sketched in pencil by looking at the sample. I then used a crow quill pen with india ink to ink the lines.

Many drawings incorporated separate drawings from several seasons, including different parts of the plant in one composite drawing using the computer (Photoshop). When all the drawings were combined, about 700 species were illustrated.

Walter did most of the writing with lots of input from Richard. In addition to the drawings I got to take Walt's manuscript, typed using an old program called Word, and organize it in Pagemaker, a desktop publishing program. Every line had to be reformatted.

It took about about 18 years to put the book together. Technology changed quite a bit over the years of preparing it, which was interesting.

Eventually we decided it was time try to get the book printed. If we continued to make corrections in the text and add more drawings, the book would never get printed.

The manuscript was submitted to numerous publishers and Universities and reviewers and finally accepted by Blackburn Press and on July 1, 2002, a box arrived at the house with the finished copy.