Blanche Evans Dean

Dean became a passionate naturalist and conservationist after teaching. One of her projects in the 1940s was the campaign to have the U.S. government to declare Alabama's Clear Creek Falls a national park, although the campaign failed and the falls were ultimately incorporated into Lewis Smith Lake. In the 1950s–60s, she helped to found the Alabama Ornithological Society, the Alabama Environmental Council, and the Alabama Conservation Council (then known as the Alabama Conservancy).^[1][3] Additionally, she was involved in the Birmingham Audubon Society, the Alabama Academy of Science, the National Association of Biology Teachers, the American Fern Society, and Delta Kappa Gamma.^[2] She established an Outdoor Nature Camp in 1951, which she directed annually for thirteen years to educate teachers and other adults about Alabama's natural history. In 1967, after assisting the Alabama Environmental Council in designating Alabama's first national forest, William B. Bankhead National Forest, she was awarded a prize from the National Audubon Society for conservation education; she was the first person from Alabama to receive such an award.^[1]

Dean was inspired to write several books on Alabama's zoology and botany by her frustration with the lack of books available on the subject.^[1] She self-published Let's Learn the Birds of Alabama in 1957, Trees and Shrubs in the Heart of Dixie in 1961, and Let's Learn the Ferns of Alabama in 1964. Her 1973 work Wildflowers of Alabama and Adjoining States was later re-published by the University of Alabama Press.^[4]

In 1975, Dean won the Alabama Library Association's first posthumous Annual Author Award for her non-fiction books. The Alabama Wildflower Society later established the Blanche E. Dean Scholarship Fund and named its Birmingham chapter after Dean.^[2] She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1985.^[1]