Floyd Swink

Floyd Allen Swink (1921–2000) was an American botanist, teacher of natural history, and author of several floras of the Chicago region.

Early life Floyd Swink was born in Villa Park, Illinois in 1921. and demonstrating typewriters for L.C. Smith and Corona Typewriter Company in downtown Chicago. He was known for his showmanship and eidetic memory, with tricks such as keeping nickels perched on his knuckles, typing the capitals of the states in alphabetical order while he was reading a book upside down." Swink served as a typist in the U.S. Navy in a Chicago recruiting station between 1942 and 1945. In 1947, Swink struck up a correspondence with noted Indiana botanist Charles Deam, author of Flora of Indiana. He quickly won Deam's respect as a rising young botanist. They eventually met for a botanical outing with two other Indiana botanists. Deam wrote to Swink shortly after the trip saying, "no Prof. of the Chicago U. can equal you. Few can." It became known by naturalists as the "Lamp List." After several years fervently collecting plant specimens and county records throughout the region, Swink published Plants of the Chicago Region in 1969. Only 250 copies were printed and it quickly sold out. This regional flora compiled wild plant occurrences from counties in northeastern Illinois, southeastern Wisconsin, northern Indiana, and southwestern Michigan—an area delimited by what was considered a reasonable a day trip from Chicago.

In contrast with other floras which were sometimes deemed "too recondite for the weekend botanist," the plants were sorted alphabetically by genus rather than in phylogenetic order and author citations were excluded, to the disapproval of some other contemporary botanists.

Swink continued work on this regional flora for several decades. The second edition was published in 1974. The third edition, co-authored with Gerould Wilhelm, was published in 1979, and the fourth and final edition was published in 1994. The third edition of Plants of the Chicago Region was the first regional flora to include coefficients of conservatism for each plant species, following the Floristic Quality Assessment system originally conceived by Wilhelm in 1977 for Kane County, Illinois.

Accolades Swink was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1995 by Western Illinois University for the vast botanical and ornithological knowledge he had acquired by individual study, as well as his generosity in sharing that knowledge with others.

Swink, Robert Betz, and Ray Schulenberg—the "Prairie Triad"—were awarded the George B. Fell Award in 1996 for their work in the pioneering of prairie restoration in northern Illinois.

Legacy

Floyd Swink is known for his lasting contributions to botany through his several published works on the flora of the Chicago region. He was instrumental in securing the protection of numerous natural areas. He worked with Robert Betz to preserve Santa Fe Prairie in Hodgkins, Illinois, and also advocated for the restoration of the Indiana Dunes.

In 2016, Wilhelm and Rericha named the plant Hypericum swinkianum (Swink's St. Johns wort) in his honor.

Publications