By Dwayne Estes
We have lost one of the most gifted botanists of the past 100 years of the southeastern U.S.
I knew of Max many years before I met him. I heard of him from other professional botanists while I was just a graduate student. Some painted a picture of Max as a reclusive, unkempt, disheveled botanist who had been down-and-out for a long time and who had given up his large private collection of 17,000 plant specimens. I had seen his unpublished PhD dissertation which was well over 1,000 pages and multiple volumes and had always admired his work long before I met Max and became his friend.
But the Max I first met in July 2009 was hands-down one of the most brilliant and gifted botanists I’ve ever had the privilege to know. In spite of the very real challenges he faced, I was truly a fan of Max and I loved him, although I’m sad to say, I wasn’t there for him. Max, to those who know him, was a complicated man. But I wanted to share a few select stories from some of my remembrances of him.
My good friend Julian Campbell of Kentucky met me in the Coosa Valley of Floyd Co., GA where he introduced me to Max and his friends, Richard & Teresa Ware, Alan Cressler, Lyndy Border, and others for the first time. Max was graying by then but had short hair, he smoked constantly, and he could barely eat a whole cheeseburger due to his ailing teeth, but I found him soft, gentle, and full of eagerness to discuss the depths of Southeastern botany that we both loved and breathed. We both instantly were drawn to each other and thus began our friendship.
For me, Max was a complicated individual who needed me more than I could give him. At a time when he needed companionship, I was at my life’s busiest point as a father of 3 young children. He needed someone who could speak for hours by phone, who could send him packages of literature to read and manuscripts to review. Sadly, there were times I avoided his calls because I simply didn’t have the time to be there for him. There were times I had to tell him that I couldn’t be as available as he wanted. I felt bad telling him that. He never seemed to tire of long conversations. But those moments when we did talk and on the several visits we had with each other, I truly enjoyed them to no end.
A couple of times, over the years, I journeyed to Georgia to visit with Max. In 2015, on a trip to Walker Co., GA to Pigeon Mountain, he was excited to show me a population of a Clematis that he suspected was the federally endangered Clematis morefieldii that he had discovered. Sure enough, we found them in flower and confirmed the species new to Georgia. He was well into his 70s then, feeble and unstable, but we clambered up the side of that mountain and back down, talking the whole way. We were fortunate to be accompanied by Tom Patrick, the great Georgia botanist. On that same trip, he showed me some rare shale barrens on the slopes of Taylor Ridge in Georgia that had been newly discovered and we visited some of his other favorite sites.
In 2019, I had the opportunity to meet Max and several others of my team down at Little River Canyon National Preserve in Alabama to explore sandstone glades, pitcher plant bogs, savanna remnants, and riverscour. We were joined by Theo Witsell, Zach Irick, Cooper Breeden, Thomas Murphy, John Shelton, Brian Keener, and a few others as we botanized our way across North Alabama. What a great couple of days. The day after Max left our gathering, we solved a major botanical mystery by learning what happened to the long lost botanist Ken E. Rogers, who was an escaped convict. The night before we solved the mystery, we gathered around to listen to “Uncle Max” tell a story of having once known Ken Rogers and botanized with him. He had to go home the next day because the physical rigors of the trip had worn him down and he couldn’t join us and be part of the “rediscovery of Ken Rogers.” We called afterward to tell him that we had solved the mystery that no one in 30 years had been able to solve.
In summer 2016, faculty at Western Kentucky University called me to say that they wanted to see if I could help provide a home for their entire collection of 68,000 herbarium specimens. They could no longer house the collection and it was in need of a permanent home. Housed within the collection was the extremely important 17,000 specimens of Max Medley’s personal herbarium collection. People had warned me that his collection was not in good shape and that it wasn’t worth pursuing. Some even suggested it should be discarded. Upon visiting WKU, my team and I found it to be imperiled, but all it needed was care and love. It was and is an amazing collection that we are fortunate to have saved.
I immediately wrote and secured a $389,000 National Science Foundation grant that allowed us to bring all of Max’s specimens, plus 51,000 other specimens, to Austin Peay State University Herbarium. Since the 1980s, most of Max’s specimens had been at WKU or before that at the Univ. of Louisville in an unusable state. My team, led by Mason Brock and Cooper Breeden, and several others joined in to bring this important regional collection to APSU. We worked diligently to transfer all of the specimens via U-haul. They had to be carefully moved, frozen to kill bugs, assessed for water and insect damage, repaired, and then subjected to a sustained 4-year long curatorial effort to image, digitize, and incorporate them into our existing herbarium or plant museum. Through this effort, we were able to grow the APSU Herbarium from 55,000 specimens to over 120,000 specimens and we are now home to Max Medley’s incredibly important life collection, which remains one of the single largest and most important collections of plants from Kentucky from the 20th century. With Max’s collection, the APSU Herbarium is now the largest research herbarium within the Interior Plateaus Ecoregion and one of the largest collections within the Mid-South.
As were in the final days of that project, Mason Brock, our former herbarium collections manager, called me to tell me he had found an incredible and unexpected find while processing Max’s specimens. You see, for 2 or 3 decades it was known to almost all KY botanists that Max had reported finding the very rare and narrowly endemic Harper’s Umbrella Plant (Eriogonum harperi) from Christian Co. KY. Max told people that he had found the species in KY but the specimen had gone missing in the 80s. Decades later, in 2005, onwards, few believed Max and he had moved out of state and had become separated from his herbarium specimens and personal library due to unfortunate life circumstances. Some assumed he must have collected it in Tennessee or Alabama (where the species is known from a few sites) and just thought he got it in Kentucky. He must have been mistaken and misremembered. I even had doubted the find myself. But Mason called me and said, “I found it. Max was right!” He had found the long, lost specimen of Eriogonum harperi from Christian Co., KY that he had collected almost 44 years ago. In fact, we approaching the anniversary of his collection (August 27, 1980). The find was made near Hopkinsville, KY in a remnant native grassland. His specimen was the last of just a dozen or so that we had to process of the 68,000 specimens transferred from WKU.
We should have trusted Max all along. As I’ve come to know Max through the past decade, one thing I came to know is how sharp his mind always was.
Max has made numerous important contributions to the botany of Kentucky and the southeastern U.S. During the 80s and early 90s he published numerous botanical publications. He described multiple new species, including the rare Silphium wasiotense (Appalachian Rosinweed) and Rockcastle Aster (Eurybia saxicastellii). He had a great eye for undescribed species and a fondness for rare habitats. He found several more new species that remain undescribed to this day. Some will no doubt be named in his honor one of these days.
Nearly six years ago, in September 2018, I traveled back to Georgia with my wife, daughters Maddie and Anna, and new friends Chip & Jodi Morgan. While botanizing at Chickamauga Battlefield in Georgia, Max bent down to examine a flower, and when he stood up, he passed out. We called the ambulance immediately and my family and I traveled behind the ambulance to nearby Ringgold with him to be with him in the hospital. Sadly, Max didn’t have any family in the region. I’ll never forget sitting there with him in his room while he waited a few hours for test results to come back. The doctor came in and gave him the news that he had cancer.
In the years afterward I am ashamed to say that I was not the friend that Max needed. I’m grateful to others who have given him personal time and took him on trips these past few years and who took the time to call and chat with him and talk botany with him. I regret I was not there.
In closing, I’ll leave you with this funny story. A few months after he got his cancer diagnosis, I was on the phone with Max and he asked for the one thing he wanted most. He asked me if I could take the time to print off a batch of research papers for him and to send him some reprints from some of my publications. Max couldn’t use a computer so he relied on friends and the local print shop to help meet his needs.
On this particular day, I relented and said, “ok Max, you bet.” I knew I didn’t have much time, but I committed to printing him a dozen papers and followed through with fed-ex’ing them to him a few days later.
Then one day a couple of years later, I was up late one night and was trying to remember what street Max lived on. I was playing around with Google Street View. I dropped that little “person icon” down onto a street where I thought his apartment was and to my surprise there was Max! He had been captured on camera by the Google street car that was photographing the streets in Dalton, Georgia, where he lived.
And to my surprise in his hands was the package of literature that I had shipped him a couple of years earlier. It warmed my heart to see him so eagerly carrying the package back to his apartment where I knew he would sit, smoke, and watch news all day while reading literature.
I’m saddened by the loss of my friend and I hope you will all join me in remembering and celebrating the life of Max Medley, one of the most gifted botanists with an incredibly brilliant mind.
Max, though you are gone and life didn’t deal you the kind of hand you deserved, you left behind a lot of people who are grateful to have known you and been in your presence and soaked up some of your deep knowledge. In your own way, you inspired many young talented botanists.
RIP friend.
Dwayne Estes is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute. He is also a Professor of Biology and Principal Investigator with the Center of Excellence for Field Biology at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN