Field Botany

Field Botany, a photo by FreeManWalking on Flickr.

This Missouri primrose along my transect helps me remember why I enjoy botany

Naked Botany

The second week of May turned out to be hot. Not the sweet heat of May with its heady scent of flowers on a soft breeze. During the second week of May the temperature soared up to ninety degrees with a heavy humidity in the air. It felt more like late July than May. In short, the second week of May offered a glimpse of my favorite kind of weather.

                On Monday I pulled my truck around to the garage and loaded up my new lawn mower and old but trusty string trimmer and blower. I drove two blocks over to College Street where I had just picked up my first yard to mow. Twenty-five dollars for what I expected to be forty-five minutes of work. It was a little yard behind a great gothic Victorian mansion, complete with lightening rods disguised as weather vanes and turrets. I unloaded my gear, pushed it through the century old iron gate, then walked the yard picking up sticks. There were several. Then I mowed. The whole affair took about an hour, not a bad exchange rate of my time for the money. In most any other venture I sell off my time for much less and often its for labor that isn’t half so fulfilling and worthwhile (in a city setting anyway) of giving someone’s lawn a manicured appearance. I find most work to be tolerable so long as I can see the effects of my efforts and so long as I feel the trade off of time for compensation was worth it.

                I’ve had jobs before where I didn’t really see what was happening though I knew I was performing designated tasks. When I was in the Navy I was a professional administrator for the most part, filling out reports, reviewing requisition form turned in by those I supervised. I wish I could say lead, isn’t the job of a military officer to be a leader? I did lead, especially at sea or anytime I was assigned to a ship. Young sailors need guidance, just as a butter bar such as my self had needed some gentle prodding and pointers from the Chiefs’ Mess. There is a way a Navy Chief, who has been on sea duty for fifteen or twenty years, has of saying “Sir” that let’s a newly pinned officer know his place in the overall scheme of things. That lasts for a couple of years. It’s a long period of training. But, ideally, young officers are being taught by the technical experts. A man or woman is born with the ability to lead if they are going to have any aptitude for it. But its impossible to do, even for someone who has the ability, if those under you don’t think you know what you’re talking about. That is one flaw I see in the system of military rank, the overnight transformation from cadet or midshipman to officer without having to put in the years of work required to really know the job. But the military addresses this issue by having senior enlisted personnel take new officers under their wing to train them. I became an efficient administrator, and a decent leader in my opinion. But I still had rather cut grass than fill out paperwork. That said, I do miss the sea.

                I miss going topside to smoke a cigar, watching the day slowly dissolve into night on a slate blue sea of gentle swells. I miss the strange creatures that lurk in the depths, occasionally breaching the surface to reveal themselves to the astonished eyes of a Tennessee landlubber. The most impressive animal I have ever seen was a whale shark, thirty feet long, the largest fish on the planet. We had run over it somewhere off the coast of Ecuador near the Galapagos Islands, the bow having cut deeply into the animal’s side. Down in my little office I had felt the bump, then the jarring vibrations as we reversed engines to back off of the large, slow moving and harmless creature. I ran topside to see what was happening. Looking down from the starboard gunwale I watched the big whale shark sloshing languidly but no doubt painfully from side to side. I watched the broad strokes of its massive tail. The whale shark was brown with white spots. After a few minutes it slowly rolled over revealing a whitish belly. A sense of finality hung in the air, a feeling that some irretrievable wrong had yielded an uncorrectable result. Slowly, heavily the large fish sank into the clear glassy water, never to know the wonder of the sun’s light again. People say what they will, the death of a large creature carries an impact that no one can deny. What the creature lacked in humanity it made up for in size. There is an emptiness in the death of all things when they die due to human actions that no amount of evolutionary selection could have prepared them for. Even the squirrel that runs under the tires of my truck puts a little kink in my day. Call me a softy but you’ve felt it too. Why else would we swerve into the lane of oncoming traffic to avoid running over a squirrel or turtle crossing the road? As for the big whale shark, I suppose his death wasn’t a total loss. Even as his big dead carcass drifted down beneath the swells a pod of pilot whales approached across the waters in response to some sort of distress signal, be it vibrations or chemical, the shark had released into the water.  Once again death sustains life.

                Alas, such is the ease with which one can get sidetracked when writing a rhapsodical piece loosely based on the nature of cedar glades. I was talking about cutting grass (which isn’t really what I meant to be writing about either) and wound up describing the death throws of a whale shark off the coast of South America. How ‘bout that for some arm chair travel?

                After I finished with the yard I drove back to my house and unloaded my lawn care equipment. In its place I loaded a one meter long by half meter wide PVC rectangle, a soil moisture probe, and a backpack with a fieldbook, a couple screwdrivers, a ruler, a wildflower guide, and a couple of water bottles stuffed inside. I called my dog who bound into my truck without hesitation, always ready to go for a ride.

                I drove out Hall’s Hill Pike with Flatt & Scruggs blaring from my radio. I love the banjo wizardry of Earl Scruggs, even more so since he invented the way people play bluegrass banjo today. My favorites are “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (of course) and “Shuckin’ the Corn”, both fast driving little numbers played by musicians so good you can almost feel the smug arrogance in their performance…the kind of confidence I like in good music.

                I pulled into the parking lot and sat in the truck for another minute to hear the last bit of a song play. Then I took a big pull from one of the water bottles, shoulder the pack and hung the PVC rectangle (henceforth to be called a sampling plot) and moisture probe around my neck and began the long trek back to my transects.

                The trail wended its way up a wet weather creekbed then over a stubbly field of prickly brambles that had been bushhogged the previous fall. The sun was scorching hot as I left the shade of the woods. All along the way I looked for new wildflowers to photograph for the field guide. Over the course of the Spring I had made many trips out to Flat Rock and I believe there is not a species of plant that had not caught my eye if it was in flower.

                This would be an opportune time to offer an overview of the lay of the land and the vegetation I walked through.

                As I said previously in this essay central Tennessee is a land of steep but relatively small hills cut with generally narrow hollows (hollers). The very middle of central Tennessee is a land of gently rolling hills much like the bluegrass country of Kentucky, perfect pastureland, most of it clay but much of it with deep, rich black soil. It this landscape cedar glades stick out like a scraps of barren wasteland sprinkled amid an oasis. They are hot and dry, covered with thin soil at best, often with none at all. Borken limestone flagstone lays scattered decaying all over the ground. Low spots are muddy holes of fetid soil in Spring and Winter, becoming hard and cracked in Summer and Fall. At Flat Rock the glades are surrounded, but never encroached upon, by post oak and blackjack oak, red cedar, and glade privet. Within the glade the casual observer will find a host of herbaceous plants producing the wildflowers that are currently the focus of my life along with prickly pear cactus, glade moss, reindeer lichen, a green alga called Nostoc, and a biotic crust of tiny brown lichens as yet unstudied as far as I know. Beneath this landscape the Earth is hollowed out and dissected by an elaborate system of caves and water ways which occasionally undermine the surface rock, causing large sink holes to collapse into the earth.

                My first transects of the day were located just over a mile back. One ran through a glade streamside meadow where a spring sends cold, cold water through a series of rock fissures to eventually issue forth through a boggy glade of grass and sunnybells. From there it joins another tributary of bare rock before entering the woods briefly to fall into a sink hole. From there only the copepods and cave crickets knows where it goes…and anyone who may have performed a dye test.

                A word of explanation is necessary to help the reader understand how my study is set up: I am studying the relationship between soil depth and soil moisture to species richness. Species richness is a term for identifying ever species of plant in a given area. To this end I have set up five pairs of parallel transect, each fifteen meters long. One of the transects runs through the wettest area of the glade while the other runs through a dry area. Along each of these transects I lay down the sampling plot five times at predetermined intervals. I measure the moisture within each plot with a high dollar moisture probe on loan from the U.S. Geologic Survey, I measure the soil depth with a screw driver and a ruler, and I visually observe all the different plants that are growing within the plot. This sounds pretty easy and I don’t try to make it seem like more than it is but often plants are very frustrating to identify when all you have to work with is the leaves, especially when the sprouts are just beginning to poke up out of the ground. Each transect takes an hour sometimes more, sometimes less, to complete. Such is the nature of botanical surveying.

                And to what end am I performing this study? Mostly to show that I know how to set up an experiment. Is that not the nature of Master’s level graduate work? Ideally I will be able to establish a predictive model what will grow where and in what concentration, become a sought after expert in helping developers and road builders figure out where to build a house or an interstate highway while doing the least damage possible to a fragile landscape. Only time will tell.

                The first two transects went well enough, took just over two hours. The heat was making me lightheaded. I sat on a flat slab of limes tone and drank some water and enjoyed an all natural, slow burning cigarette. This slab of rock is my favorite spot at Flat Rock. It sits at the edge of the woods under a scraggly by striving winged elm. It was here a couple of months before that some friends and I had sat into darkness one night when we had come out to walk our dogs. While I was off checking one of my transects, making sure no raccoon or coyote had pulled my nails out of the ground (it has happened) one of them had built a little fire of dead cedar branches. When I walked back up I was surprised and suspected that building fires in a nature preserve was probably forbidden but there wasn’t a sign (at least not here) and the fire was so nice as the chill of night came on. I asked for a pull from the wine bottle.  So nice. In the dryness of the spicy smoke of the cedar and the little glow of the crackling fire I felt totally at peace. After awhile the fire died out and we hiked back in the dark. Two weeks later I returned and found a sign hanging on the little winged elm outlining forbidden activity within the confines of the nature preserve:

                No fires

                No alcohol

                No dogs offleash

Come one Department of Environment and Conservation…let a guy have a little fun while he does his research. At least I saw the sign before I broke yet another rule: No camping.

                Refreshed but still sweating like a stuck hog I walked farther back into the large glade and found the nails that marked my third transect. Sampling is tedious, if not terribly physically demanding work. Especially on a hot day with the sun beating down from above. The heat had turned the sky to a high hazy grey. I decided to break up the monotony of sampling I’d take off my t-shirt and shorts. Hell, boxers too. Why not? Getting naked is a constructive step toward alleving boredom. I sampled the next two plots au natural and in the process got a pretty good sunburn. But know this: as the day wears on sampling can get sloppy. The sampler may loose sight of the importance of taking notice of each blade of grass. He or she must be vigilant to maintain focus and make sure the sense of focus is not lost. So getting naked is a necessary indulgence at times when the day has worn on, the sun has beat down, and the thought of laying down a sampling plot to see what’s there seems like an enormous task.

Plant Invaders

            Grey clouds hang off the sky like a wet overcoat dripping more water onto the already saturated world, the drip-drop drip-drop of beads of rainwater forming and falling off the deep oxygenated green of the mosses, grasses, herbaceous shrubs and trees; the every magnificently green hills and hollers of central Tennessee.

Greenest state in the land of the free…

                Nature is more than a visionary experience. It fills all the senses, from the cold jolt of a raindrop on ones head to the shades of green contrasting with the grey of the sky massaging the rods and cones of the eyeball to the heady scent of the privet in bloom, vicious invasive plant that it is, the nose can hardly face reason, that this plant should be eradicated from the landscape, when it offers such a seductive appeal to the olfactory senses. Who are we humans to be the judge of what should live or die when the process of natural selection, fitness in biological terms, has already asserted that this privet (Ligustrum sinensis) is a survivor, a thriver, a builder of empires in any temperate landscape it invades?

                Or do we have a right, a responsibility to destroy all that is invasive, alien, not of this place? Is some fanatical racism at hand telling us that this illegal immigrant of a plant, brought over solely for the utilitarian purpose of landscaping the unnatural assault on nature that we call a lawn, has gotten out of hand when it left the manicured artificial habitat of city lots, escaping into the countryside and surrounding woods to compete and destroy any chance of life for our native population of similar shrubs and small trees?

                I have spent summers employed by the Federal gov’ment walking through woods with loppers, machete, and brush blade cutting this privet then applying a lethal dose of Garlon, a vile smelling poison, the vapors of which burn as if they would eat away the lining of the nasal cavity, all in an effort to ensure that particular plant would never more raise a leafy green arm toward the sky. Usually the application worked, nut often it didn’t. Weeks later little sprouts would spring up from the base of the plant I had meant to kill but in actuality had only severely pruned.

                What does it mean when a plant or an animal creeping in from some other local, or a race of people moves in and outcompetes native populations? In a not so veiled metaphor, what would it mean if the privet moved in and outcompeted the bush honeysuckle, itself an invasive shrub, to the point that the bush honeysuckle disappeared under the assault of the new invader?

                There is a philosophy to be found in botany, a philosophy of what grows where and why it is there. There are questions to answer regarding what plants should be fought for and preserved and which ones should be left to the forces of fate to slip quietly into extinction, having left a dead end in the evolutionary line, not through any lack of adaption to the landscape but through an inherent weakness in the DNA that Nature so specifically chose for that plant to pass on through hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of generations.

                All these musings lead me to an observation at once perfectly sensible and utterly contradictory. In Nature that which is too highly specialized is often the most susceptible to extinction. To give an example, there is the star orchid (Angraecum sesquipedale) in the Amazon whose corolla tube is so long that when the plant was first discovered Charles Darwin predicted that a moth would eventually be discovered with a proboscis of sufficient length to pollinate the plant. It would likely be the only creature on Earth that could perform this service. Several years later a moth was discovered that fit this description, and was fittingly named Darwin’s hawk moth (Xanthopan morgani praedicta). Study found that this moth with the twenty-five centimeter proboscis was the only pollinator for the star orchid and the plant was the only nourishment sought out by the moth. For millennia the co-evolutionary arrangement has worked. But if for some unforeseen the reason, be it a peculiar disease or loss of habitat, the moth or the orchid should become extinct the other would soon follow.

                Now for an example of specialization keeping a plant from fading into the oblivion of the millions of species that have come before but are no more. The cedar glades of central Tennessee are harsh landscapes where standing water can be present from December through March or April, followed by a few weeks of pleasant dampness. During this period of April and May the cedar glades burst with color as prairie larkspur, glade mustard, Nashville breadroot, Sunnybells, glade sandwort, and Pyne’s groundplum, push forth an explosion of color in the age old story of growth, flowering, seed production, then decay. By the middle of June the sun had dried up all water and the glades are dry as a bone, the mud between the limestone hardened like a brick. The flowering plants of a few weeks ago have withered and blown away leaving only a hopeful seedbank as a as yet unfulfilled promise of continuation next year. In their place are poverty grass and little bluestem grass, thinly leaved angiosperms such as Gattinger’s prairie clover and the thorny prickly pear cactus.

                Hardly any exotics encroach onto this landscape. The promise that the glade will continue indefinitely into the future seems assured as long as no developer comes along and pours an asphalt parking lot on top of it. Since the glades have been recognized as unique habitats and gained some protection from state and federal governments the only serious threat of utter annihilation has come from the flooding of the Percy Priest Dam in the late 1960’s when the waters of the Stones River backed up over thousands of square acres of pristine habitat in the heart of glade country. But for the efforts of a few botanists the Tennessee coneflower (Echinacea tennesseensis) would have likely been lost in the name of civic water supply and recreational opportunities for boaters.

                Is saving one rare, endemic wildflower worth scraping plans for a dam that will benefit many more people than would ever care to walk out in the hot landscape to look at a rather scraggly plant? The answer to that is above my paygrade. But in defense of saving plants and their habitats, an array of medicinal benefits have been garnered from members of the genus Echinacea.

                As for the privet, it stops dead in it’s tracks at the edge of the glades, as if unable to take that one step each year, that, when multiplied by increments each year, would allow it to colonize the glades. The privet can’t quite master the landscape enough to enter it, much less work incrementally toward colonizing it. Instead it stands on the unmoving fringe, competing with the native privet (Forysteria lugustrina) and the redcedars and the winged elm. But they too have mastered this environment at the edge of adversity. And in doing so they have stopped the invader in its tracks. Adversity leads to diversity.  

Plants of Central Tennessee

Iris cristata, a photo by FreeManWalking on Flickr.

     Landscapes are the canvas on which we lead our lives. A life spent along the rocky coasts of the specific must certainly see the world through a different lens than someone who has grown up in the spruce and fir woods of the Rocky Mountains as they arch their jagged spines toward the Colarado sky. Simirlarly one who has spent his or her existence in the Red Rock country of the Four Corners area will see the world in a different hue than then cold-loving soul who has lived out their days amid the boreal forests and lakes of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Like most people I have walked the ground of many varied landscapes but I know that I am a product of the deep green hills and hollers of Central Tennessee. My mountains are rolling hills to many, my rivers not half so wild and furious as western torrents dropping thousands of feet through boulder strewn channels. But each landscape, whether dramatic or sublime shapes those who live there, filling each of us with our sense of place. On the rarest of days, when the sun hits our eyes just right and there is the sweet hint of a particular flower on the breeze we can feel at home, in a way that can only come from being in the landscape where our earliest memories were formed, where someone we loved pointed out a particular tree or hill or creek and called it by a name that we shall never forget.
     That is why this book is focused on the plants of Central Tennessee. Most of these plants are not special because they grow nowhere else (though for many that is the case), the majority can be found from Missouri to the Carolinas, Massachusetts to Alabama. What makes these plants special is that they have surrounded me throughout my life, having been tread under my boot on an explorative hike or examined up close with a hand lens during my more studious moments as a botanist. They have created my view of what I expect to find when the cold snow and drizzle of winter subsides and Springs trips up from the South and finally adorns Tennessee with its leafy green blanket of color and warmth.

Coyote

Coyote, a photo by FreeManWalking on Flickr.

Took a wrong turn in Cumberland County while looking for the Obed Wild and Scenic River...this is what we found!

Botanist's Reverie

This morning our flowering plants class walked out for one of Dr. Blum’s infamous m ii-field trips. We walked over to the shingle oak which blew over in last week’s storm. Though more appropriate to the dendrology course I took under him back in the fall of ’09, Dr. Blum discussed the growth rings and the significance of what they represent. He asked for a volunteer to count them. I’ve always had too short of an attention span for the tedious task of counting growth rings but when no one came forward I volunteered anyway. Beginning in the heart wood center I began, keeping my place with an ink pen: one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve…seventy-one. The old tree was seventy-one.

It was a large seventy-one, owing to growth a few years ago in which it put on half an inch per year for a few good years. But in recent years the old tree had gone into decline. The last four or five years exhibited growth rings of less than a quarter inch. The days were numbered for this tree. Dr. Blum pointed out how some of the newly exposed roots already looked dead. The shallow, spreading roots of this variety of red maple didn’t allow for the strong anchoring of the white oaks with their taproot systems. But the tree had grown tall and large, much larger than the surrounding walnuts which were a good ten years older, having been planted from walnuts brought back from Mount Vernon by a former grounds keeper.

                Afterwards we walked on, Dr. Blum and myself at the front discussing the scene in A Sand County Almanac where Aldo Leopold discusses the oak he cut down for firewood and in its rings remarks on how the tree had faired under different owners (really paying overseers) of the land. We talked a little of Loren Eiseley and wondered why such a brilliant, thoughtful and somewhat dark author had fallen out of the public consciousness in the decades since his death in 1977.

                This is the last class I will take with Dr. Blum. It is a wonder that I was able to learn his botanical knowledge even now. Back in ’09 he missed weeks of class toward the end of the semester with a mysterious medical condition. As the story goes he was in the bar taking a shot in celebration of his birthday when he went down with internal hemorrhaging.

                But I’ll take what I can from these old school naturalists, who have paid their dues participating in the hard-living lifestyles of botanists of old. There is an art in the knowledge of plants. From learning the vocabulary, interpreting fuzzy differences in an attempt to find order and a sense of belonging for a specific plant, to hours spent collecting, pressing, and mounting herbarium specimens I don’t doubt all great botanists see themselves as artists in some way. What is art if not identifying the order in a world that otherwise seems chaotic to the untrained eye.

Friends: the longest four-letter-word

Good Gawd…Mother Earth & Other Pretty Girls has made it to Amazon.com, here in the U.S. and surprisingly in the U.K. as well where there are already two used copies for sale. Discovering my book was finally for sale online yesterday while sitting in the hospital waiting room waiting for my dad to get out of surgery was a little victory in a 36-hour period that didn’t hold many victories. (But one of those victories was the fact that he came through everything just fine.)

The weekend was a washout, not from rain – the weather was beautiful, likely added to the trouble – but from so much beer I lost count of how many cases were scattered about the yard and my kitchen floor. It was all fine enough Saturday morning, sitting around with Jake and Grigori, sipping coffee till my bowels hurt and my bladder exploded. Then we decided to sit outside. One beer led to another. Then Ty Paint pulled up in his little Saturn car and I could see the day might devolve into abandon and unproductivity. Kate pulled up on her motorbike and the guitar came out. And of course Eli got off work and showed up with another 12-pack of Budweiser.

But oh, so much for listing participants. We sat around the front yard on couches and office chairs and as far as I can tell no one had a care in the world. Later Ty and I walked up to the square where I promptly fell asleep on the bar for an hour and a half.

I awoke Sunday feeling washed out but okay. I had a hangover but it was the emotional kind. I realized I had finally run poor little Meadow off, not so much run her off as pushed her toward Mark. He’s younger and definitely more capable of falling in love than I am. He doesn’t play the stupid catch and release game that I am unfortunately prone to. Nearing forty I have begun to overthink my collection of years versus the years collected by someone else. When she left with him Saturday night a little of that old black magic walked out of my life.

But she came to me Sunday night. I needed her badly so I left the door unlocked. But it had all changed. No longer did she strip down and curl up beside me merging our bodies into one warm organism of comfortable sleep. We lay in bed a safe distance apart. We talked. She told me again where I had gone wrong, it was in the cedar glades when, in a moment when I had should have shown her the most kindness and tenderness, I said something more predictive than true: “I don’t see this going anywhere, I see us being very close friends.” A week hence we lay there subdued, sex verboten, only the tenderest of kisses planted on her pretty head as we stared at one another with tired, sad eyes and she told me about her ex-boyfriend.

We all know “friends” is the longest four-letter-word in the English language and sometimes it’s the ugliest. It is the ugliest when a “friend” has to watch his or her “friend” falling into the lustful, hungry arms of another who is less than “friend”. But maybe if this happens on the backside of the original lust it is more bearable. In this way a man and woman can talk sympathetically to one another about subsequent relationships, because each is a known commodity and it is forever understood that they have not been relegated to “friends” due to an unsaid lack of attraction. So all I can tell you girls is that if you like a guy and really want to be friends with him, be his lover first if so inclined, then you will find a friend for life.