St. Louis ? Thomas Croat has stranded more cars in rivers than some people will drive in a lifetime. He also has accidentally set some vehicles on fire and rolled two – one down a Costa Rican hillside and another down a dam in Kansas.

And it’s all been in the pursuit of plants.

“People say I’m accident-prone,” said Croat, a curator at the Missouri Botanical Garden. “I say I just take more chances than most. But if you’re not willing to climb a tree or jump over a ravine, there are just some plants you’re not going to get.”

Croat, the P.A. Schulz curator of botany for the garden, is one of the world’s most prolific plant collectors. Recently, he bagged a doozy in an Ecuadorean forest – a plant so big it took seven sheets of paper to mount one leaf.

That specimen, the appropriately named Anthurium centimillesimum, was his 100,000th plant collected. Only three other botanists in the world have collected more. He also has described 800 plants that were new to science, most of which he gathered in the 41 years he has worked for the garden.

“He’s pretty unique in that most botanists never approach those kinds of numbers,” said Robert Magill, the garden’s vice president of science and conservation.

Croat has collected plants in about 38 countries, including Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica.

He has joked that you could blindfold him and drop him off in any forested area in South America and he would either know where he was or have a good idea based on the composition of plant species.

Legendary adventures

While Croat’s collections make him prolific, his adventures make him near legendary.

While collecting plants for the garden, Croat has been caught in a revolutionary war, mistaken for a drug dealer and even kidnapped by a Venezuelan rancher who wanted Croat to take him to the United States to see whether he had cancer.

“Many times when he goes off collecting, we can’t wait for him to get back so we can hear his stories,” Magill said. “He’s very interesting and very driven in what he does.”

Garden staff are quick to compare Croat to Indiana Jones, the fictional globe-hopping adventurer in movies.

Like Jones, Croat is dogged in his pursuit. Consider the time he wrapped a badly cut hand in a bread bag to stop the bleeding so he could continue collecting plants in a remote area of Colombia.

His mangled hands speak to some of his adventures in the field. And Croat, a gregarious fellow prone to starting sentences with “And furthermore,” will gladly offer the rest.

Fascinated by flora

Growing up on a farm in Iowa, Croat was initially more interested in crop plants and weeds during the early years in his life.

But that changed at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, where he met a professor who could easily identify most plants and could rattle off the names of those plants, usually in Latin.

That impressed Croat, who began his pursuit of plants soon after.

In 1967, he managed to persuade the Missouri Botanical Garden to hire him to study the flora of Panama as part of a joint venture with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

His work took him to Barro Colorado, an island in the middle of the Panama Canal Zone.

“When I was up in the trees collecting plants, I’d see the boats going right underneath me,” Croat said. “I remember the howler monkeys, but more notably the spider monkeys, which had a nasty habit of throwing things like feces and sticks.”

It was in Panama that Croat became interested in aroids, a family of plants that includes such familiar plants as philodendron and calla lilies.

Today, he oversees a greenhouse at the garden that includes more than 6,500 aroids, the largest collection in the world. The collection is populated with Croat’s discoveries – some look like house plants, others have leaves the size of a kite.

“Aroids are the most important ornamental group in the world,” Croat said. “If you go to McDonald’s, or Kentucky Fried Chicken or any bank lobby, mostly likely the plants you see will be half, if not all, aroids.”

Croat’s newly discovered aroid, Anthurium centimillesimum, was found last year in an Ecuadorean rainforest. He hopes to return next month to scour the diversity-rich area.

Croat, who recently turned 70, says he doesn’t plan to stop collecting plants anytime soon. In fact, he hopes to be able to describe 1,000 new plants before he retires.

The only thing that slows Croat down are arthritic knees. But he has learned to adapt to continue his passionate pursuit of collecting plants.

“For many years, I always went by myself,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone slowing me down. Now, I see the advantage of having someone who is young enough to carry equipment and climb trees go along.”