Bulletin of Remarkable Trees Vol. 2 No. 3
On May Theilgaard Watts
This issue is coming out a little later than I’d planned, but I sorely underestimated the time it would take to go through all the material for the next few bulletins!
An exciting development (that is also partially to blame for taking up lots of time this past week) is that you can now follow Bulletin of Remarkable Trees on Instagram and Twitter @bulletinoftrees! I’ll be posting photos, sketches, and snippets of things I’ve come across in my research, and hopefully, it will provide another avenue for you to talk with me about what I’m writing about in the bulletin each week.
May Theilgaard Watts
One of the most interesting colleagues that my grandfather, Lowell Kammerer, worked with at the Arboretum was May Theilgaard Watts, a famous naturalist, artist, and writer.
May Theilgaard was born in 1893 in Chicago and developed an interest in plants from the time she was young, due in part to her father being a landscape architect. She attended the University of Chicago, graduating with a degree in botany and ecology, and married her husband, Raymond Watts, in 1924.
Watts’ move to Ravinia, on the north shore of Lake Michigan outside Chicago, served to heighten her interest in nature, conservation, and the preservation of natural landscapes. After working with ‘Friends of our Native Landscape,’ a group led by famed landscape architect Jens Jensen, Mrs. Watts began teaching classes at the Morton Arboretum. In 1942, she joined the Arboretum staff as a naturalist. She worked to champion Arboretum classes and programs focusing on ecology, gardening, nature sketching, and nature writing.
One of Mrs. Watts’ grandest achievements was her push to create what we now know as the Illinois Prairie Path out of the abandoned Chicago, Aurora, & Elgin (CA&E) electric railway tracks.
Having lived in the Western suburbs of Chicago my whole life, I’m certainly familiar with the miles of trails that make up the prairie path. But I had no idea about its beginnings as an electric rail line or the dedicated work that May Watts and her contemporaries put into making the transformation a reality! What a beautiful gift to Chicagoland from this group of nature lovers.
Arboretum Work
May Watts propelled the Arboretum’s education initiatives forward during her time on its staff. Her classes, per my grandfather’s journals, were consistently anticipated and well attended:
“Wednesday was a big day at the Arboretum - with Mrs. Cudahy acting as hostess to the cartoonists of the Tribune. They were all here - John T. McCutcheon, [Carey] Orr, [Joe] Parrish, and others to attend a class in tree sketching by Mrs. Watts. [Clarence Godshalk] and I also attended and accompanied them on a bus tour of the grounds afterward.” - Lowell Kammerer, Sept 1946
My grandfather also conducted many classes, lectures, and educational opportunities for the Arboretum. Occasionally, as he wrote in his 1947 journal, he filled in for Mrs. Watts as an instructor when she was unable to teach, and vice versa: “Class night again. Substituted for Mrs. Watts from 9:00 - 10:00 PM lecturing on Flowering Trees and Shrubs.”
Not every duty shouldered by the Arboretum staff was something they looked forward to, like some visits and tours for V.I.P.s who happened by:
“If you were around tomorrow afternoon you could help us out by acting as interpreter to Count and Countess Bourbon Busset, distinguished French visitors due to pay us a visit. No one here seems to be too anxious to show them around. Mrs. Watts says “she’s going to be out” and I’m expecting to leave early to get ready to start to Missouri.” - letter from Lowell Kammerer to his brother, April 1957
International travel, more than visiting international dignitaries, was something my grandfather and his colleagues all seemed to anxiously anticipate (and I’ll cover many of my grandpa’s trips in issues to come!) In letters to his brother, there are many details about the comings and goings of his fellow Arboretum staff, including Mrs. Watts:
“Ray Schulenberg left for Greece at 10:30 last Sunday AM and was due in Athens at 5:00 PM the following day. Phenomenal, isn’t it? Mrs. Watts is in Europe too, having sailed on May 15, [on the] Ile de France. They took their car over. Ray will hike through Greece.” - Lowell Kammerer, June 5, 1958
This travel was usually followed by slide presentations and lectures, which all of the staff seemed to truly enjoy:
“Last night I come out to the Arb lecture series to hear Ray Schulenberg’s ‘A Botanist Looks at Greece’. He put on a very excellent program - one hour lecture, one hour of slides…Even Mrs. Watts was taking notes like mad!” - Lowell Kammerer, Oct 21, 1959
Bulletins and Quarterlies
My grandfather worked consistently to present the Arboretum’s monthly Bulletins of Popular Information. The sense I’ve gathered from his journals and correspondence is that he immensely valued his colleagues’ hard work, input, and camaraderie on these publications, especially May Watts.
Beyond contributing writing, art, and expertise to the articles contained within the bulletins, it’s clear Mrs. Watts also worked to broaden the publication's reach. In February of 1946, my grandfather wrote to his mother and brother about the most recent bulletin: “Letters of commendation have been coming in about the one on tree & shrub forms - so I’m feeling better. Mrs. Watts almost doubled our subscription list while I was gone - and I have been worried as to whether or not I could keep it at its present high level.”
Illustrations and Arboretum Map
While there are numerous examples of Mrs. Watts’ illustrations, sketches, and paintings available in the digitized collections of the Morton Arboretum (which I highly recommend you peruse at your leisure), I’m going to focus on one piece that I found in my grandfather’s documents:
There is no date printed on this map, but using a few clues, I was able to narrow down when it might have been created:
1. Something I noticed right away is that the iconic Four Pillars at the east end of the Hedge Collection are not depicted. The pillars were erected in 1960, so the map must have been created before that year.
2. A helpful clue as to the date of this map came courtesy of my dad, who answered a question I had: why is there no lake near the east entrance of the Arboretum (aka Meadow Lake?) He described watching workers dig that lake at the Arboretum when he was a kid, and photos of this process from the Arboretum library archives helped me confirm that timing. So this map is from before 1959, which is when construction of the lake occurred.
3. The last way I could narrow down this map's date is, again, courtesy of the Arboretum library archives. Preliminary and black and white versions of this map in the digitized archives have 1943 listed for their origin date. While the only color map available in the digitized archives is a reproduction from 2014, I assume this original color map is also from 1943 or shortly thereafter.
One of the things I love most about this map is the border, which is comprised of various illustrated tree leaves, berries, and cones. The features on these are just beautiful and mirror the amount of detail Mrs. Watts put into the rest of the map.
The unique compass in the upper right side of the map is so creative, and I love the month-by-month highlights of features one could find in the Arboretum. The character just drips off of this piece; it’s playful, informative, and incredible to look at!
Thus concludes our little jaunt through the incredible art, teaching, and life of May Watts! In the spirit of her love for education and spreading appreciation of nature, I hope this has inspired you to seek out more of her lovely and meaningful work and to revel in the beauty of the natural world around you. In the next issue, I’ll be taking a brief break from trees and plants to talk about rocks, rock gardens, and manuports (a ten-dollar word if I ever heard one!)
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Amazing presentation from the best use of today's digital age. My introduction to the life of Mrs. Watts was a gifted book of Reading the Landscape, 2nd Edition 1975 which lead to a similar Rabbit Trail to the history of the Prarie Path, Trout Park in Elgin and outward to plant press books in France from the collection of Lewis and Clark Expedition. Thank you Mrs. Watts.