This month’s Audubon Miami Valley guest speaker is Dr. David Brandenburg from the Dawes Arboretum in Newark, Ohio.

He will be speaking on “Botanical Travels from Coast to Coast” Monday March 18 at 7:30 p.m. in the Community Room on the second floor of the Lebanon Citizens National Bank, 30 Park Place West in Oxford. His talk is free and open to the public.

Brandenburg has traveled circuitous routes across the North American continent looking for fascinating plants, either by himself or with kindred spirits, sometimes finding these species with advance knowledge of their general locations at other times by serendipity. He is delighted to spend an evening with Audubon Miami Valley 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 twenty dollar a night lodgings. His decades of field work throughout North America culminated in the 2010 publication of National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Wildflowers of North America. This acclaimed field guide is currently sold out but if you own a copy be sure to bring it along and David will autograph it for you. David’s Guide to the Wildflowers originally sold for $20 but is being offered on the second-hand market for between $57 and $150. Amazon has some new copies for sale at $1,000.

David is a taxonomic botanist at The Dawes Arboretum, who previously worked as a field botanist for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and served as curator of the herbarium at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. He has a degree in pharmacy and a master’s degree from Miami University and a Doctors degree from the University of Oklahoma in Botany. David lectures, leads hikes, and conducts hands-on workshops on cultivated plants, trees and shrubs, grasses and sedges, aquatic and 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.