Teenager Luana Boner lived on the south side of Chicago during the Great Depression, but aspired to study botany at the State College of Washington (now Washington State University). Unfortunately, she lacked enough money for bus fare and did not have a car. But she did have a bicycle, and an excess of initiative and pluck. So, Luana biked the 2,000 miles from Chicago to Pullman, arriving in time for the Fall 1936 semester. Boner worked odd jobs along the way and often slept in farmer’s fields or barns as she crossed the windy Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.
At WSU, Boner and another student, Virginia Weldert, spent the summer of 1939 collecting plant specimens for the WSU herbarium along the Columbia River in Ferry and Stevens counties, Washington. They were assisting WSU graduate student Thomas Rogers with an inventory of the flora along the upper Columbia River before the area was inundated by Grand Coulee Dam in 1940. Their collections and photographs are all that remain to document the vegetation below the 1290-foot level of the river.
One of the species that Boner and Weldert collected was Columbia locoweed (Oxytropis campestris var. columbiana), a rare plant found only along the Columbia and Methow rivers in northern Washington and the Flathead Lake area of NW Montana. This taxon was originally named as a full species (O. columbiana) by Harold St. John, an early curator of the WSU herbarium, but was later made a variety of the more widespread species, O. campestris, by legume expert Rupert Barneby. Unfortunately, the rising waters of Lake Roosevelt wiped out more than half of the known populations of this plant in Washington, though the species persists at four sites that escaped flooding.
Luana Boner graduated from WSU with a degree in botany in 1940. She and her husband Buel Sever settled in Tacoma. In her 60s Luana decided to take up hot air ballooning and became an FAA-certified balloon pilot. For more on Luana Boner Sever’s remarkable life, see the tribute by WSU’s Addy Hatch.
– Walter Fertig, 18 March 2025
