CONTRACTORS CORNER

Name: Jeff Hansen

Location: Topeka, KS

Bio: My interest in native plants began while I was in high school on the farm in SD. We had a book on rangeland plants of SD. I started studying it and walking through our pastures. Twenty years later I became involved again in native plants and started landscaping with them and learning all the plants that exist in the wild in northeast Kansas. I ended up creating my own website www.kansasnativeplants.com and now have a little business selling native plants for landscaping. I’m also addicted to making paper out of plants. You can see examples on my website. I’ve been the president of the Kansas Native Plant Society since 2005. I like plants so much that my friends call me “weed boy”.

I became involved in the Millennium Seed project after hearing a presentation by Betsy Allen at the Kansas Native Plant Society annual event in October of 2006. I had been exploring various natural areas around Topeka for the past ten years and knew of many good locations for collecting. Once I collected my first species, I was hooked.

I’ve been collecting in and around Topeka and the surrounding counties. I’ve also collected in the vicinity of the family farm near Mitchell, South Dakota.

I love being out in nature. Finding a species and collecting the seeds is the biggest challenge but I find it to be quite enjoyable. It sure beats working in a cubicle (my former life was as a software developer). I really do love it; even though I almost got sprayed by a skunk, fell in a lake, had my first reaction to poison ivy, and spent hours collecting only to find out that I couldn’t get the required ten thousand seeds.

High points of collecting have been discovering species I had never seen before. Discovering an alien weed new to Kansas and discovering a native plant never reported in South Dakota.