Cassidy Moody
Shade, decoration, and...space odyssey? A sweet gum tree at the Missouri Botanical Garden has been hidden in plain sight since its seedling was planted there in 1992 and its history was seemingly lost. That is until Cassidy Moody, digital media specialist for the Garden, rediscovered the tree's true identity: a seed that rode aboard the first flight of the Discovery space shuttle with astronaut Charles Walker.
Ahead of the 35th anniversary of Discovery's maiden voyage, which lifted off on August 30, 1984, Moody and other garden officials are working on a sign to be displayed by the tree near the Henry Shaw Mausoleum. They hope to have it up by the anniversary.
When he started researching, Moody didn't know what kind of plant he was looking for, where it would be in MoBot, or even what mission it was from. He was only trying to confirm whether the Missouri Botanical Garden had any space trees in its collection.
"It was almost like an urban legend among people that had been here long enough," Moody says. "I was nervous that I was risking shattering the dream and maybe finding out we didn't have a space tree."
Moody eventually identified the tree through the Garden's digital cataloging system, but the entry said only that it had been to space. He at first followed a hunch that it had been part of the Apollo missions, but the timeline wasn't adding up (those missions occurred almost 20 years before the sweet gum arrived at the garden in 1992). Then he gleaned a major clue from the paper copy of the original filing record—a tiny annotation reading "Seeds from Space Shuttle." A google search brought him to the Discovery missions, and he reached out to the only person who could confirm the sweet gum's identity: the astronaut who'd brought the seeds aboard the shuttle 35 years ago.
Cassidy Moody
Charlie Walker was the first non-government official to travel in space through his job at St. Louis-based McDonnell Douglas (which has now been acquired by The Boeing Company). During his college years at Purdue University in Indiana, Walker worked for the U.S. Forest Service. His passion for forestry stayed with him, leading the engineer to bring nearly 200 sweet gum seeds along for the journey to space.
"I don't think it's uncommon for astronauts to take little trinkets into space, and it just so happens that brought something living," Moody says. "So it's not just an object that went to space, it's a living thing that can serve as a living tribute to space exploration."
After his mission, Walker donated most of the sweet gums to places in Indiana, but his wife, Susan Flowers, had worked for the botanical garden and suggested he donate two seeds to the collection. One tree died in 2007, but the other is nestled at the edge of the lawn near the mausoleum, and as of its last measurement in 2012, is over 50 feet tall.
Cassidy Moody
Moody says this story is just one of many interesting histories MoBot has to offer.
"The garden has been here for 160 years," Moody says. "We've planted a lot of trees, but it's always fascinating to me when you find out it's not just the tree itself. It's what other person, place, or event it can connect you to."
