Someone I was recently reading (I cannot remember who--Berry? Wirzba?) lamented the decline of local knowledge among modern westerners. "Most people," whoever-it-was said, "cannot recognize even a hundred plant species within a mile of their home."
Or something to that effect.
This claim has stuck with me, even if the name of its author and its location has not.
Can you recognize a hundred plant species that are living within a mile of your home? I'm not sure I can.
Well, I can name the ones I planted, of course. The dianthus,
the roses,
the cabbage,
the leeks.
I can recognize most of them throughout their life cycle. I can recognize a tomato seedling, plant, and fruit. I could definitely differentiate a tomato seed from a non-nightshade-family seed, and I might could even pick out a tomato seed from among the peppers and eggplant seeds.
And even among those I didn't plant, some are easy to recognize.
The magnolias . . .
. . . my neighbors' crape myrtles . . .
. . . my dogwoods and azaleas.
But some aren't so easy.
Look at all these trees in my neighbors' yards. I can see them from my deck, but I only know a handful of them.
I've no idea what they are.
That one in the corner I know.
That one. But I only know it because I've seen it in the spring, when it looks like this:
See? Dogwood. But I don't know that I'd recognize it if I hadn't seen it in flower.
And I like my maple in the front yard--it's lovely in the fall.
But I have no idea what kind of maple it is. How do you even tell?
I can't even begin to identify other plants. Take a look at this stand of trees I go past at least three times a week, on my walk.
What's in there? To me, it looks like just a jumble of trees.
There's a maple seedling in there, I think.
I'm pretty sure it's a maple. Those leaves are very mapley. But what kind? Is it like mine?
What about those pine seedlings next to it?
Are those the same pines as the big ones in the picture above? Or are they different?
And what about that flowering tree?
I think I've pulled out weeds that look just like it from my garden. What are they?
I've been gardening for several years now, and I just don't pay that much attention to things that were there before I was.
I'm coming to believe that "paying attention" is one of the most crucial faculties of the human being. Just paying attention.
Elie, over at Ragamuffin Studies, pays attention, I think. She knows
where the sun rises and sets along her fence at the summer solstice. She can name
the birds that visit her land.
Biped is paying attention
to her grandfather's garden.
I'm starting to think of "paying attention" as one of the theological virtues, in fact.
So, spurred on by Biped and Elie and Wendell Berry and/or Norman Wirzba ('cause, let's face it, if Wirzba said it, he probably got it from Berry), I'm going to start paying attention. I'm going to try to identify 100 plant species in my neighborhood.
Would you like to join me?
All you have to do is take a walk near your home, and try to name the plants you see. Keep track, and see if you can get up to a hundred. Try to learn something about those hundred plants, if you don't already know a lot about them.
If you have kids, you can call this homeschooling (or afterschooling) science class, especially if it involves any kind of recorded observations or library research.
You can do a more official version with me, if you'd like. I'm going to start on Saturday, and I'll post the rules of the challenge when I do.
I'm calling it the 100-Species Challenge.
Comments (11)
You know what's driving me nutty about paying attention to GrandDad's garden? The plants I don't know the names of. I can look up just about anything if I have a word for it, but hardly know where to start when I have something without a name.
Somewhere out there there must be differential botany ID tools, a kind of decision-tree thing that could lead you through the process of narrowing down what to call a given plant. If you find something you like, please blog it.
Because in the meantime I'm stuck browsing through endless pictures in plant books, getting nowhere fast. Or else starting with some kind of guess as to what something might be and working from there. E.g.: my aunt said of mystery herb overgrowing the back door, "it looks like oregano." So I look up oregano (wild marjoram), and from there find its sister plant, sweet marjoram, which is what I think my herb turns out to be.
But I can't find anything about the plant that GrandDad calls "Chinese cabbage." Because when I look that up, I find Bok Choy -- which is not what is growing along our fence behind the zucchini.
Biped--
Is this it? If not, try mizuna or tatsoi.
I definitely need one of those botany tools. No idea how I'm going to find out the names of plants I don't know.
I think that the one little tree you thought might be maple could be a sweet gum. But hard to tell from the picture. Also, the one with the flowers and such looks like a mimosa. Again, hard to tell with the pictures. But that's my 2 cents. I did a leaf notebook in middle school. Let's just say I went a little type A overachiever on the project and got a LOT of extra credit. Some of it stuck with me.
That is a cool challenge. I probably can't identify 100 species, but it would be fun to try.
Anyway, another great resource is www.arborday.org. They have an online tutorial called "What Treet is That?" and it walks you through how to identify trees. With practice you get better! They also have pictures of trees by region, which might be of help.
As far as small plant life goes, I can't be of much help. But Better Homes and Gardens has a large book that goes into many of the plants that people actively plant - including herbs, fruits and veggies. This has helped me with my own gardening quite a bit, though I haven't used it much for identification. Yet.
We'll join you. I have been interested in doing something like this for a while.
Sounds like something Thoreau said... though I'm sure he did not, at least not in those exact words. But identifying those 100 (or more!) local species was his life's work :)
Sarah, thanks for the compliment.
It does help to pay attention, but it also helps to know how to direct that attention. I had a botanical and naturalist education, complete with credentials in Biology (emphasis on evolution and ecology) and informal training growing up with a family chock-full of naturalists in the old sense.
Also, for those of you who do not know where to start, botanists do indeed have 'decision trees' that are called dichotomous keys. These work to direct your attention towards the features of a plant that can be used to identify it's taxonomy (phylum, class, order). Google Scott's Botanical Links or FLORA OF NORTH AMERICA and look for a key.
FYI: Gymnosperms are plants that do not flower, Angiosperms are plants that do. There are about twenty common plant families in North America, and knowing the basic characteristics of these families will help you identify most of what you see to the genus level. Plants speciate wildly, and tend to be promiscuous in blending species--a plant species is harder to define, but knowing the genus will give you all sorts of useful information about what you are looking at.
One problem with the popular field guides is that they do not ordinarly contain keys, so you must hunt through pictures without knowing where to begin. A key provides you with a sensible way to narrow down your search based on leaf shape, pattern of vasculature, number of flower petals, growth habits, and other characteristics that are unique to plant taxa.
Have fun!
Cool idea! I think I'll try this with my kids. I remember hearing something similar years ago that stuck with me, that kids can recognize hundreds of corporate logos, but can't identify 5 kinds of trees.
By the way, the last tree picture you showed, the flowering one, is a Tree of Heaven- very very non-native and invasive and good to pull out as weeds before they get very big.
Whoops. Its not a Tree of Heaven its a mimosa as I see someone noted above. See- I definitely need to practice recognizing species. Thank goodness for the Google
Definitely sweet gum. White pine would be my next guess, and mimosa "princess tree" which is invasive but not insane crazy like the stinky Tree of Heaven (aka "ghetto palm")...