“Open this book to any page and you will step into the shoes of an itinerant naturalist, accomplished artist, and environmental activist who took up the most quixotic of tasks—to annotate and illustrate professor Edwin B. Smith’s pioneering 580-page survey of his state’s flora. Imagine spending decades traipsing across mountains and fields to observe and make inquiries of every leaf, flower, and seed found within your state’s borders. This is work that no one asked him to do, and that had never been done before, anywhere in the world, in precisely this way. To call it a work of genius is not an exaggeration. A breathtaking work of art, science, and spirit that has been decades in the making.”
—Amy Stewart, New York Times best-selling author of The Drunken Botanist
“In An Arkansas Florilegium: The Atlas of Botanist Edwin Smith, Illustrated by Naturalist Kent Bonar, an unplanned collaboration spanning forty years between the University of Arkansas’s pioneering authority on Arkansas flora and an ‘Ozark Thoreau’ from Newton County comes to a beautiful and sublime conclusion. Shortly after the 1978 publication of Smith’s Atlas and Annotated List of the Vascular Plants of Arkansas, Bonar, a transplant from Missouri then employed with Arkansas State Parks, launched his own decades-long enterprise to produce thousands of detailed illustrations of the plant life chronicled in Smith’s magnum opus. He carried his own copy of the book into the field, drawing the plants alongside and sometimes over Smith’s descriptions of them. The result was an illuminated manuscript that further enriches our understanding of the botanical landscape of the Natural State. Smith’s and Bonar’s respective work has been carefully preserved, thoughtfully arranged, and handsomely presented in an ‘augmented reissue of a groundbreaking botanical study.’ Robert Cochran introduces the volume, the second in the University of Arkansas Press’s Arkansas Character series, a joint project of Fulbright College’s Center for Arkansas and Regional Studies and the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.”
—Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Book and Media Notes, Spring 2018