Botanical Travels from Coast to Coast

Botanist David Brandenburg has traveled circuitous routes across North America--- either by himself or with kindred spirits--- looking for fascinating plants. He sometimes finds these species with advance knowledge of their general locations, other times by serendipity. He will spend an evening with the Finger Lakes Native Plant Society reliving some of the highlights from these botanical adventures, where most days ended in a pup tent on the side of the road or in $20-a-night lodgings.

His decades of field work culminated in the 2010 publication of National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Wildflowers of North America. Brandenburg, botanist at The Dawes Arboretum, has done field work for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and served as curator of the herbarium at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York.

Dave lectures, leads hikes, and conducts hands-on workshops on cultivated plants, trees, shrubs, grasses, aquatic & wetland species, wood anatomy, and other topics. He has a lifelong passion for economic botany: how plants are utilized as foods and flavorings, medicines, perfumes and cosmetics, textile fibers, natural dyes, and materials for construction.