PELLSTON, Mich. — Jeremy Stoll came to the University of Michigan Biological Station this summer planning to draw plants.
Two weeks later, the queer comics artist, folklorist and history scholar was also thinking about kinship, memory, mushrooms, museum exhibits, century-old herbarium specimens and what it means to be fully present in nature.
Stoll, an associate professor at Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio who publishes as Jaromir Stoll, spent half of July at the historic research and teaching campus in northern Michigan, where they worked on a comic book project rooted in ecology, foraging and close observation of plant life. Stoll also was inspired to create comics profiles of UMBS researchers after spending time with scientists in the field.
Stoll’s work blends botanical art, personal narrative, folklore and science to help readers better recognize nonhuman life.
“I want people to be able to notice the things that are around them and appreciate them,” Stoll said. “Comics are a fun way to pull people in.”
A University of Michigan alum, Stoll first heard about the Biological Station as an undergraduate in Ann Arbor, where they studied from 2000 to 2005 and took a class with poet and writer Keith Taylor. Taylor spoke highly of the rustic campus founded in 1909, planting a seed that would eventually bring Stoll north 20 years later with the help of a UMBS fellowship.
UMBS is one of the nation's largest and longest continuously operating field research stations. With cabins, classrooms and laboratories nestled along Douglas Lake, the largest of U-M’s campuses is situated on more than 10,000 forested acres surrounded by lakes, rivers and wetlands about 20 miles south of the Mackinac Bridge.
While at UMBS this summer, Stoll hiked trails and explored the library and herbarium on campus. The artist also visited regional history museums and sketched plants and landscapes.
The project began with a short list of plants Stoll wanted to observe closely including red pine, strawberry, blueberry and cattails. But the plan quickly expanded into a broader meditation on ecological relationships.
“What are the plants like? What are their shapes, what are their colors, how do they exist alongside one another?” Stoll said. “What are the textures?”
Working in pen, marker and watercolor, Stoll spent time drawing bark, meadows, lake views and plant forms.
Plein air painting — making art outdoors from direct observation — is rewarding, they said, but difficult as light changes and weather shifts.
For Stoll, the work is not only about documenting what a plant looks like. It involved sitting with a place long enough to see what relationships are already there.
The final comic book was originally imagined as a 12- to 16-page work of botanical art.
During Stoll’s time at UMBS, however, it began to evolve. They interviewed researchers, instructors and others based at the field station in Pellston for the summer, gathering stories about teaching, ecological research and local history. Those conversations will likely become part of the finished piece.
The comic, Stoll said, is about what can be learned from plants and from the people who study them.
“There’s scientific information about their ecological communities,” Stoll said, “but also, how am I encountering them? What am I learning from them?”
One theme that emerged is connection.
Stoll spent a lot of time thinking about mutualism, kinship and the idea that “nobody is ever really alone.”
Plants, fungi, insects, humans and landscapes are bound together in ways that are easy to overlook.
Comics, Stoll believes, can make those relationships visible.
Dr. Majorie Weber, a UMBS researcher and instructor of the Insights From Trees course, spent time with Stoll talking about the relationship between wild grapes and mites.
"Talking with Jeremy instantly transports you to that creative space between art and science, where wonder in the natural world comes alive,” said Weber, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at U-M. "The inspiration Jeremy sparks is a perfect example of how places like UMBS that bring scientists and artists together can lead to something truly new.”
Stoll’s approach is deeply influenced by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the botanist and author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” whose work invites readers to consider plants and other nonhuman life as animate beings and members of a shared world.
Stoll said Kimmerer’s thinking helped them frame a question that runs through the project: “What are my kin?”
That question connects to Stoll’s own history with foraging and the outdoors. They grew up in a small rural town in southeastern Michigan, in a family that valued time in the woods. Their grandfather was a forester, their mother grew up on a farm and loved flowers, and their father loved eating things found outdoors.
As a child, Stoll said, they didn’t necessarily think of picking berries or recognizing walnuts as “foraging.” It was simply part of being outside.
“We’re going to go eat berries out of a bush,” Stoll said, recalling a childhood of foraging wild black raspberries and mulberries.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, that childhood knowledge took on a new shape. Stoll began hiking and foraging more intentionally with a friend. They noticed mushrooms and plants they had previously missed, including chanterelles, which can be bright orange and abundant but still somehow invisible.
“It was wild to notice things I hadn’t been noticing,” Stoll said.
That sense of discovery now informs their teaching and art. Stoll teaches a Plants and People class Columbus College of Art and Design and said many students feel alienated from the natural world.
Comics offer one way to close that distance.
Stoll’s current work also is connected to a larger scholarly project. Stoll studies comics culture and comics history, and this summer they are writing about what they call “ecology comics.” Those are comics that teach ecological knowledge through the form’s combination of words, images, sequence and storytelling.
While scholars have written about environmental themes in comics, Stoll said less attention has been paid to comics that directly teach readers about plants, pollinators, neighborhood ecology or relationships among species.
For Stoll, ecology comics are both educational and inviting. They can make scientific knowledge approachable without flattening its complexity. They also make space for memoir, local history and cultural knowledge.
At UMBS, that meant moving between field observation, library research and conversations with people. Stoll also traveled to nearby natural areas and communities, including Wilderness State Park, Indian Point, Grass Bay and Duncan Bay Preserve, and visited local history museums, including in Cheboygan, where a maple sugaring exhibit caught their attention.
The result is a comic that is still taking shape. It’s part field journal, part research profile, part memoir and part invitation to look more closely and recognize that plants aren’t background scenery but living kin.
The University of Michigan Biological Station serves as a gathering place to learn from the natural world, advance research and education, and inspire action. We leverage over a century of research and transformative experiences to drive discoveries and solutions to benefit Michigan and beyond.
Our vast campus engages all of the senses. Its remote, natural setting nurtures deep thought and scientific discovery.
Founded in 1909, UMBS supports long-term research and education through immersive, field-based courses and features state-of-the-art equipment and facilities for data collection and analysis to help any field researcher be productive. It is where students and scientists from across the globe live and work as a community to learn from the place.
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