Harry Ahles was among the last botanists to gain his position through pure knowledge of plants rather than through the usual system of academic advancement. He gained his first professional position as herbarium curator at the University of Illinois, with only a high school diploma (and a recently acquired one at that). Oswald Tippo, in his obituary of Ahles (Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 109(1): 84-6), tells a story of how Ahles was confronted by the police while collecting weeds in New York City (he was serving as a gardener at the New York Botanical Garden). When the officers realized that he was a botanist, they took him to a plot of alleged "tomatoes" which Harry determined to be marijuana. His unusual "field work" in the city resulted in a publication: "Interesting Weeds of New York City" (Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 78: 266-274).
Ahles served as herbarium curator at UNC Chapel Hill for ten years, having followed Ritchie Bell to North Carolina to work on a major floristic study of that state. This work resulted in the Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas(UNC Press, 1964), which still serves as the primary flora of this area and as the basic text for students of systematic botany at UNC. During his years at UNC, Ahles added over 200,000 plant specimens to the herbarium. Similar vast gains in the collection were made while he occupied his later position at Amherst. Ahles's departure from UNC was unusual, to say the least. According to Tippo, who he contacted about the possibility of a job at the University of Massachusetts, Ahles left UNC because they had provided the herbarium with air conditioning and "I will not work in an air-conditioned laboratory." His love of nature and his dislike of modern "conveniences" was also evident in his choice of residence. While at Amherst, he lived in a log cabin which he built on the top of Horse Mountain. His only companion was his dog, Montana.
