Field Botany

I signed up for a six-session class in field botany this summer. I had taken a botany course in college, but I retained about as much information from it as many people do from seventh-grade Spanish classes. The attractive aspect of the short class was the field trips. I have bad memories of blurry microscopic images. The class included undergraduates and several nontraditional students, like me. One of the nontrads had been the instructor’s second-grade teacher.

Botany Bluff trail

Looking over the first few pages of class material was daunting. The eleven-page primer of botanical terms looked like it might at least help improve my scrabble game. Spelling the words had to be easier than understanding what they were on about. I tried to read the class material before each session. In class I tried to take notes on the printout pages. At home in the evening, I wrote up my interpretations of what I was supposed to have learned. I decided to transfer my notes to the computer, mostly in hopes that I could lay out the information in some way that would cause some of it to stick in my brain. I found myself explaining roots and shoots to my daughter. I actually sounded like I had a clue. This might just get me somewhere, I thought.

Beardtongue.
We shredded a few of these in class.

I managed to get the microscope to show me anthers and carpels on the second day. It also produced images of a ferocious yellow dragon with horns. Tiny insects that occasionally fall out of flowers look quite alarming at 25x magnification. On the field walk that day, the teacher asked me how many anthers I could see in the flower of a wild pink. This had about the same result as the medieval joke about tricking the devil into enumerating the holes in a colander. The poor dimwitted guy keeps counting over and over, “One, two, three. Uh. One, two, three. Uh.” At least I made it as far as nine.

I discovered by taking daily quizzes that I don’t mind drawing a blank as much as I mind thinking that I know the answer when I’m actually wrong.  Working my way through a botanical key was also a humbling experience. The key to local trees threatened to provide me with many delightful hours of wandering around in the timber, checking a printout and mumbling to myself. I collected bur oak leaves from two different trees on one of the walks. They didn’t look all that similar to me.

I know people who could
identify this tree in five
seconds. With the botanical
key, it took us half an hour,
but now I know what makes
it a bur oak.

I had heard rumors that botanists were sufficiently obsessed to jump over private fences to photograph neighborhood flora. Our teacher raided other classrooms on occasion. To illustrate the Liliaceae, he darted out of the room (leaving the undergraduates deep in a discussion of bands I had never heard of) and returned with a florist’s vase of Asiatic lilies, larkspur and coneflowers. “I don’t know who these belong to,” he warned us, “so don’t dissect them.”

On the last day we visited a local prairie held in trust by the state and the family of the woman who had treasured it. We went out in groups to find examples of plants from the families we had studied. For some reason, each group scored 16 of a possible 10 points. Botanists are evidently as generous as they are obsessed. The conserved prairie held a small memorial to the woman who had loved the wildflowers there — a pink quartzite boulder, a bench, some peony bushes and a plaque dedicating the wild grasslands to her memory. I can imagine no finer tribute.

Lavender Moon

One of the many names for the full moon of April is the Pink Moon, supposedly derived from early colonists’ perceptions of spring blooms in New England. In this part of the timber, I’m seeing more lavender, especially in late April and May.

The native redbuds, Cercis canadensis, are the most spectacular. They usually bloom in mid-April before the trees have leafed out. For a couple of weeks, the light is filtered through a cloud of blossoms. The roadsides look like an invitation to enter Faërie. My daughter gathers the blossoms to sprinkle on cinnamon toast and drop into salads. When we first bought this land, my husband and I (both lifelong locals but townies) walked through the woods in March. There were more unfamiliar trees than either of us had seen before. We asked each other, “What are all these trees with the dark red buds on them?” In April the answer became obvious, a delightful “Duh” moment.

The lilacs are next. We planted purple and white Syringa bushes early on. We now have a variegated lavender selection spreading beside the driveway. As far as I’m concerned, the lilacs can be any color they want as long as they smell like ecstasy. The species name comes from syrinx, a hollow tube or pipe. Syrinx was a nymph who escaped the pursuit of the wild God Pan by transforming herself into reeds. Pan gathered the hollow stems and invented his signature instrument, the panpipes or syrinx. My daughter likes to compose flute music in the garden and the woods, where the singing of crickets and spring peepers inspires her. The neighbors sometimes hear distant piping, elusive as the scent of lilacs.

In May the sweet rocket goes off. It’s also called dame’s rocket and lady’s rocket, Hesperis matronalis: Mother of the evening. It was here before we were, favoring the edges of the timber. It moved into the yard with great abandon. One year I bought a couple of plants of the alba variant at a local nursery. They mixed it up with the natives immediately. Now the rocket explosion features not only the native deep purple, but also a random selection of white, pink and lavender blossoms.

So I use a personal name for the moon of May. The light changes as it pours through blossoms, spilling purple shadows on the ground, showering the timber with the Mother’s blessing.

 (Listen to "Syrinx" by Claude Debussy: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbRC3scRYeE 

performed by Paula Robison.)

Wild Violets

I grew up in a small town in this county, but I'm still something of an outsider, resettled in a different township. My nearest neighbors are a farming family. They’ve lived and worked here for four generations. They had their doubts about me when I first moved to the timber, but their matriarch had worked at a café across the street from my father’s print shop when I was little. She remembered him stopping by every morning for coffee and me coming in with my parents for lunch, piping up with a request for a “girl cheese” sandwich. She vouched for me, and her husband told other neighbors that I was okay; they had “knowed me since I was knee-high.”

Jack-in-the-pulpit

My dad loved the timber. In his teens, he transplanted wild jack-in-the-pulpit, deertongue, dutchman's breeches and lady's slippers to his mother's garden. Jacks, wild violets and deertongue grew on the north side of our house when I was growing up. Each spring, he would take us hunting for wildflowers in the timber. I was allowed to pick only a small handful of dutchman's breeches to take home. We left the mayapples and jacks alone where they grew.

Mayapples

I must have been about five years old when he told me it was my job to pick all the violets in our yard as they bloomed. Every day after the first flower appeared, I would hop about in the deep grass, plucking blossoms and clutching them in my fist until I could carry no more. We put them in small vases, then in juice glasses, then in empty jelly jars until we had filled the kitchen counters and the dining room table with violets in various stages of bloom and decline.

Toothwort

I’ve never felt like a stranger in the timber here, even though I’m still learning the names of the trees and finding new wildflowers hiding under the coral berries every spring. The spirit of this land has known me since I was knee-high. The violets speak for me.

Snow Piercers

Snowdrops are the first flowers to bloom in the winter here. You can’t really call them spring flowers when they pop up in February, or even January some years. They are not natives, but they naturalize well and are not invasive. I planted them my first autumn here. In more than 35 years, their clumps have expanded and thickened. They seem to come up a little earlier after their first few years in this climate. Last year, I saw several blooms on Twelfth Night, January 6. This year, it was closer to the end of January, and I had to brush leaves away from the magic spot by a tall stone where they bloom earliest to see the white buds rising from the earth.

In my yard, the most reliable spot for early snowdrop sightings is between a walnut and a cedar. They emerge triumphant there and hang above the snow until the thaw begins, attracting bees on sunny days. They spring up so early that shade does not hinder their growth. I planted a row of snowdrop bulbs across a sunny flowerbed several decades ago. Those bloom latest of all, although they form a bushy row, slashing through a bed of periwinkle. Their blossoms often last through March, and sometimes into April.

A friend who spent a sabbatical year in the Netherlands told me that a field near his house bloomed white as snow in February. To spread so far, the colony must have been several hundred years old. I lived in Luxembourg for a year, long ago. The houses on my block all faced the street, with a large central courtyard divided among individual lots within the interior walls. In February white patches sprang up all through the middle of the block, jumping fences and dotting each garden with silver-green snow. My landlady brought me a small bouquet from her garden. She told me their name in French: perce-neige, snow-piercers. Some people say it's bad luck to bring the blooms inside, but that little nosegay delighted me.

Snowdrops seem to be overlooked at fall bulb-planting time. They often appear in the last few pages of catalogs under the heading “Others,” lost among reams of tulips and daffodils. Even among my gardening and beekeeping friends, I still meet people who do not grow them. I’ve taken to buying bulbs in multiples of 50 in the fall and giving them away to anyone who is willing to start hunting for flowers in February.

There are 75 varieties of galanthus, but only a few are readily available. They are members of the amaryllis family, native to Eurasia; their botanical name means “milk-white.” They thrive in cold weather and tolerate warmer winters. Deer and rabbits don’t eat them. They can be transplanted “in the green,” as soon as the blooms have withered in spring. They usually appear a good month before the crocuses and the native wildflowers, providing early forage for bees. Best of all for idiot gardeners like me, they are just about foolproof to grow. Discovering their bending blossoms when the snow begins to melt revives my spirit every year.

Deep Snow

In the days before the storm, we laid in supplies along with everybody else. We tried to shop in off hours to avoid long checkout lines. We called and emailed friends to delay plans. We restacked wood and hauled it inside by the wheelbarrow load. I dug hand warmers and yak trax out of storage.

The day before the front moved in was halcyon, warm as the coming of spring under a south wind. It was a chance to get all the outside work done, but I spent at least half the day playing in the woods. At sunset the sky split open to let the cold front striate the west, layering its colors like a painter. TV weather forecasts predicted 10 inches of snow and ran line after line of closings.

At dawn the sky was white and still, but the snow held off for several hours. It began like gossamer, barely visible in the air. It came down all day long, light and dry and fine. We carried a few more loads of wood inside. I replenished the bird feeders, even though raccoons often try to yank them down after dark. Deer are also fond of sunflower seeds, we discovered. Their agile tongues slip delicately into the ports.

Snow fell for a day and a night. A deep line of cloven hoof prints led to empty bird feeders in the morning. The main deer trail lay unused and pristine when I walked it that afternoon. The next day, many of my footprints held new hoof marks. Velvet noses had delved deep to graze on the liriope, a ground cover the deer ignore when it's clear.

With school canceled, the county road crews took their time plowing. (School bus drivers insist on clear roads. The guys who drive snowplows dig out the bus routes first, intimidated by the gals who drive buses.) The neighbors plowed the lane with a tractor. ATVs roared over the fields. The roads were deserted.

Walking in falling snow can transport you to an alternate reality. Edges blur and waver. Shapes shift. Sounds soften. You begin to listen with your skin. The spaces between trees are portals. Cedars bend under gathering clouds. Underbrush becomes lace. Stillness drifts to unsuspected depths. The timber holds silence. Safe below, the earth holds a promise of snowdrops.