[3] Pease said of his early life: I will confess that I am by nature a collector, that I began with marbles and horse chestnuts, advanced to postage stamps, continued with botany and books, and at all times have gathered facts and occasional ideas.
[2][3] During his lengthy academic career, Pease articulated the following philosophy of education: ...from the first grade to graduate school, the aims are threefold: first, to fit us for more successful practice of our respective callings; second, to enrich and refresh our lives with more intelligent and varied avocations; and, third, to render us more helpful in our manifold relations to the community at large.
Pease further expounded on his personal views and habits when he said: ...in lack of sufficient cranial space for dead storage, I enter (facts and ideas) methodically on 3 x 5 slips of paper.
Still onward, however, boiling down like Aristotle and the maple-syrup makers, a thousand gallons of facts to a half-pint of principles; or, to change the figure, bringing order into a few of life's storage closets, discovering there some garments which still have good wear in them, and persuading my students to wrap this rainment about their intellectual nakedness.
Pease traveled with Merritt Lyndon Fernald on botanical expeditions to Mount Logan in southwestern Yukon, to northern Newfoundland, to Nova Scotia, and to Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec.
[2][11] About him Fernald wrote "how, with such a keen interest in plants and their natural habitats, he was lured into classical philology is beyond the comprehension of a mere botanist of more limited horizon.
Pease himself named a long list of taxa including species in the Aster, Botrychium, Carex, Agropyron, Potentilla, Houstonia, and Epifagus genera.
[2] Pease's studies of the vegetation around in the vicinity of his summer home in Randolph, New Hampshire led him to say that it "has probably changed more materially during the last hundred years than at any period of the same length since the last glacial epoch.
In some cases, Pease combined his vocation (classics) with his avocation (botany) in the publication of papers such as "Notes on ancient grafting" (1933) and "Mythology and mycology" (1947).