Leaders in Texas Conservation: A Tribute to Lynn Lowrey

DC: I remember I roomed with him a lot, and I can remember that he never slept, and you'd wake up and hed be reading, and he had all kinds of [http://www.botany.com/ botany] books. And hed sleep two to three hours a night.

Now he would have a tendency to kind of fall asleep in the afternoon; when he was driving you had to watch him, but he was a very, very tireless individual moved slow, but he was slow and steady and always had his eye open for a new plant, and I was quite impressed with his character.

The trips were one thing but his character was another he had a great effect on me in terms of his giving nature. He doesn't fit in well with the modern society in the sense everybody in my business now wants to patent a plant.

If you find a plant, blah, blah in your nursery whatever, you can patent it and you can get twenty years where you have copyright royalties and and make all this money. Lynn was way beyond money, and thats a different kind of a person than we have today.

MS: I think that one of [http://cohesion.rice.edu/naturalsciences/arboretum/aboutint.cfm?doc_id=3316 Lynns] , I think, biggest attributes, and you see it here today, is the way he touched people and the way he, you know, his his legacy is in the fact that people want him to live on ininin in thein the concept ofof bringing these wonderful plants back, you know, intointo the into future gardens.

And he did it in a manner that that didnt utilize money. It utilized, you know, a helping hand, or a a comment or or just the energy of his tireless work and dedication toto the plants themselves.

And, and I think people today realize, you know in this based on the ones that we saw in the room today, you know that that, you know, he was incredible and and how many they how that hes getting more energy after hes deayou know its like a Van Gogh, you know that hes getting stronger since hishis departure.

And so you know that that somebody is a whole lot more powerful when they can touch somebody in that manner. So thats all I would say, I'd say hes touched a lot of people and in that vein, his legacy will live on because they're not going to forget about him.

SC: The other thing that Lynn did was that he didn't didn't withhold information. He wasn't he didnthe wasnt secretive with good information, like hes got a secret plant hes going to grow and make a lot of money on.

He just gave things away so quickly so so so easily that I think people felt empowered to go start their own thing. And so people took bits and pieces of Lynns information and experience and see certain hed say Id hear him tell people, "You know, you ought to

you ought to go start yourself a nursery, and grow some of these things," and I so I think Lynn was responsible for hundreds of start-ups in in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horticulture horticulture] and nursery and books, you know, he probably, you know when he talked to [http://www.jillnokes.com/ Jill Nokes] or, um, any of the people that wrote books based on a lot of Lynn's information.

Ah, Lynn was very empowering to other peopleI hate that word because its kind of over used but but its probably the best word to describe it.

And without any hesitation, without any kind of the slightest bit of jealousy in all his all enthusiasm and if you got it going he was excited and happy and you dont find that much.

JF: The the excitement of finding. That part, thats the first thing that probably comes in. And then the excitement of sharing and getting and seeing it distributed and seeing it preserved.

Ah, as I said many of these things that dangerously getting getting dangerously scarce in the wild.

We've seen, you know, any number of times where youve seen a plant and you you know, you don't it's gone the next time you go. of course you want people to enjoy it, yeah, and youyou want people to go away andand say, "Well, Im going to do something with the environment. Im going to..." you know,

if its just planting one tree or two trees or two shrubs or whatever, that all helps. But I know what I knowI do want it to affect peoples lives, and II know that Lynn wanted itall this sharing and all of these plants to affect peoples lives.

MAP: He got a call one day saying that this gentleman needed some [http://biotech.icmb.utexas.edu/botany/camphist.html camptotheca] for cancer research and the only place that he could get them were from California and that it was very, very expensive, and they just needed to have a bigger group to work with, needed more plants than they could afford.

And so Lynn hung up and said, "Well let me think about that just a little bit." And he remembered that something like thirty years ago he had planted a camptotheca in a mans yard in Kingwood.

And so he went up, called him up and sure enough, yeah it was still there, and so he goes out and there are seedlings coming up. And so he dug up some of the seedlings and brought them home, and Mike Anderson said, "you know, and we soon had cornered the market on camptotheca."

And then, uh, from all of those little babies, Mike Anderson said, "We either have to get out of the nursery business and raise camptotheca, or we have to do something else."

And at this point was even after, I think, Lynn had been diagnosed with cancer himself. And they ended up giving these plants to the [http://www.stehlin.org/ Stehlin Foundation] and to Bio-Med, and for their cancer research.

CS: He was so humble and and and you may ask me, "Well, what do mean by that?" Well,

he he allowed everyone to come to him and bring whether it was plants or information, and he let it unfold in your own mind. He didnt add to it by inserting his position in time like, "Oh, I collected that 18 you know in 1980s over by so-and-so, where did you find it?"

It was like, "Oh, wow, you ought to you ought to do this with it." Or, "You ought to try it in the ground." Or, "Let me get,I mean, I'd like some seeds of that." And thats what immediately stuck in my mind, is how differently this person operated, how he thought and the pictures give it away.

If you notice if you saw these pictures of Lynn, you notice he's always looking to the ground. Hes always kind of almost kind of bent over, and almost kind of the caricature his humbleness because he rarely would look at you in the eyes when he was talking, like wedhed never talk like this.

Just wasn't just wasn't in his character, just didnt happen. And when you meet people like that itit does stick in your mind.