After finding a rare flower last seen in Maryland when Teddy Roosevelt was president, Wes Knapp excitedly headed home to share his breaking botany news with his wife.

“I’m pretty sure I came home sweaty and tired and told her we found the Solidago rupestris” – a bright yellow flower that most others would know as the riverbank goldenrod – “and she said, ‘That’s great, can you take out the garbage?’” Knapp recalled.

It can be a tough road for those who see treasures where others see weeds. But to hear Knapp talk about his work is to listen to a man describing his little slice of heaven every time he gets to walk “out in the woods and get my vitamin D” as a botanist and ecologist for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources.

Knapp slowly walked the banks of the Potomac River in Montgomery County recently to get back to where he had made his find in September.

He was constantly scanning, his eyes high and low – “that’s the harbinger of spring, just a few inches tall and amongst our earliest flowering plants,” he said, and “you got spicebush starting” up here.

As he inched closer to the exact spot, Knapp, who lives in Hurlock, Maryland, ticked off a mental list of virtual high-fives he received in his inbox when his buddies heard what he had found.

“One from Alabama put it on Facebook and tagged me, because someone tagged him and said, ‘This is a cool story,’ and a person from out West send it to me,” he said. “I dunno; people get excited, which is good. People do care about nature.”

He made nature his life’s work after a horrible day in an organic chemistry class during his sophomore year at Catawba College in North Carolina. It was a nice spring day, he said, and he had spent three hours in a lab where a reaction hadn’t worked.

“I realized then I couldn’t live my life in a lab,” he said.

Knapp went outside to the steps of the science building to regroup in the sun and bumped into a professor.

“He said, ‘Do you want to work-study in the herbarium,’” Knapp remembered. “And I didn’t know what it was, but I said yes.”

Michael Baranski, Knapp’s former professor, said the rediscovery of the riverbank goldenrod in Maryland is “one of those neat things that keeps us all moving forward.”

“We’re glad to see that element of our biodiversity is still around,” Baranski said. “Every plant, every animal, every other organism that ever existed represents a unique store of genetic information, something that has evolved over millennia to occupy a certain space in the landscape.”

When something goes extinct, we feel sad, he said. But when we find something that seemed to have been gone, “we get excited and we think, ‘Wow, gee, it’s still around – that’s great.’ “

Growing up, one of Knapp’s favorite characters was Bert from “Mary Poppins” because, every day, Bert had a new job. Now, at 36, Knapp says of his work: “That’s so great. It’s something different every day.”

He said his brother Randy “told me I’m the closest thing he knows to Indiana Jones.”

A New Hampshire native, Knapp came to Maryland in 2001 to take his first, and so far only, job with the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

He frequently can be spotted with a hydration pack strapped to his back, sipping from a blue plastic hose looped over his right shoulder. For his botanical field expeditions, he also is seldom without a hat, two magnifying glasses and plenty of bug spray.

Of field work, he says: “Though it’s, like, sexy – the idea of all this great field work – there’s a lot of ticks, there’s a lot of biting insects, there’s a lot of sun, dehydration. It’s really challenging. I’ve had Lyme (disease) twice.”

In addition to lots of shoe leather, Knapp relies on a few tools suited to the digital age. He is regarded as among the first to use a computer database to cross-reference sightings of rare flora in neighboring states.

The goldenrod was just across the river in Virginia, and given how seeds can travel by wind gusts and water flows, Knapp thought it had to be in Maryland, too.

He and a team started a search along two islands in Maryland’s portion of Great Falls Park, and during a second search they found a patch of about 50 goldenrods near Carderock, just west of Bethesda.

“As soon as I walked up, I said, ‘There it is.’ It had the right feel, the right gestalt, the right look,” he said, describing the unique shape of the plant’s leaves.

Knapp’s wife, Heather, said she probably did talk about taking out garbage after he came home with the news.

The middle-school science and health teacher said she understands that plants are important. But sometimes when she is cooking dinner and has their two daughters on her hips, she said, the botany talk can go in one ear and out the other.

Still, his excitement is what she loves most about him, she said. “I married him because he’s so passionate about everything,” she said. “He’s passionate about me, he’s passionate about my kids, and that same passion he has for us, he has for his work as well. His work isn’t work – it’s what he loves to do.”

“What I hope my kids take out of it,” she added, “is that you’re going to work hard and sometimes you might not go out and find a plant, and other times you’ll hit that home run and find something you think was extinct.”

Knapp said he thinks that nature isn’t always here for humankind’s benefit: “Sometimes nature is here for itself, and we’re just a component of nature.”

“I don’t understand the difference between the last rhinoceros being shot and the last population of this goldenrod being wiped out,” he said. “What’s the difference?”