More romance in the wood collection

I know I said no more wood posts.  Well, not exactly, I think it was more along the lines of the blocks of wood not being everyone's cup of tea.  But last week I found this beauty:

 

 

 

Let me set the scene.  It is the summer of 1941 & we are in darkest Africa.  Feel free to picture the collector Stearns as you will:  Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, whatever gets you through the night.  & actually we aren't in DARKEST Africa, we are in Algeria, so it is more like driest Africa.  But in June 1941 Italy invaded France (France, if you didn't know was the colonial empire that "oversaw" Algeria from) so things were metaphorically dark whatever the climate.

Stearns has made his...her way from the settled shores & into the Atlas Mountains for whatever reason: espionage, human trafficking, searching for King Solomon's Mines, what-have-you.  & in the mountains, Stearns find a tree.  Not just any tree but a tree of legend.  Or rather, a tree species of legend.  & at the very least Stearns takes down a branch (a branch of some size given the piece I handled) & ships it to.....

A shop teacher in Miami.

The best part of this story is that the only part I know is absolutely true is the shop teacher in Miami.  That & there really was a war on.  How could I not love the wood collection?

Number 1.

In general I don't talk much about my work at the herbarium.  I mean it's blocks of wood & index cards.  I take a card, I find the wood specimen it references, I check it off & I enter the information in a DBF file for a future index.  It is exactly as boring as it sounds & more than a little bit soothing.  Most weeks one or two small things happen that make me happy.  Even the sad things make me happy. 

 

Yes, yes there are sad discoveries.  The most heartbreaking thing I ever tripped over at the herbarium was a pile of plants still in the newspaper they were collected & pressed in.  The top half pre-dated WWII & everything was collected by either So&so Senior or So&so Junior or both.  It spanned a couple of months & small range of places in the Southeastern US.  Then there was a gap, timewise.  The next specimen was in newspaper was dated after the war & from there on everything was collected by So&so Senior.  There were another 20 years of plants collected & no more sign of So&so Junior.  It took a little while to register & when it did, my heart started to race & my hands shook & I had to leave the mounting room because I started to cry.  I told the students I was working with that I had gotten some grit in my eye (this does actually happen) & rushed to the bathroom. 

 

This week in the wood collection I discovered this index car specimen combo.  This particular collector was prolific (I am 99.9% he is no longer collecting; I am 99.9% sure he is no longer alive, actually) & it was a small thrill to find his very first.  That number in blue pen is the herbarium's record number, that typed "1."  is the collector's number.  The rest of the label is a delight, too.  So much detail about where the specimen was collected.  Not just the country & province, which is usually the best I can hope for but a landmark that might indicate an environment (the ridge).  While this is not uncommon in plant specimens, this is the first time I can ever remember seeing an environment in for a wood.

 

The only thing missing is the date the wood was collected, a very rookie oversight.  Trust me, in the world of the wood collection this is adorable. 

Going to the dogwoods

One of my new year's resolutions -yes, I know it is May & hey I never said this year anyhow- was to document more of what I am doing at the herbarium.  I think I have said before, but I know it has been awhile, a herbarium is to plant specimens as a library is to books.  It houses the specimens under a system that allows retrieval, etc.  It is hard for people, even people who are my age, to contemplate a catalog that does not have any connection to computers what-so-ever, but the reality is that the wood collection at the herbarium is still on index cards; you want to see a particular family, you go to the card file that the plant was assigned to circa whenever the cards were written which was anywhere from the 1930s to the mid 1980s, pull the card, find the number which can be tricky all on its own as there is no standardized way of recording information on these cards but if you are lucky some kind soul will have written the number in the upper left hand corner, you take that number & go to the cabinets, search through hundreds of pounds of wood & pull up your specimen.  If you are lucky.

Enter me.  I am slowly but steadily recording the information on the cards in a single database (OKay that's a lie: for convenience & archival safety I use smaller databases in the same format & merge them into one periodically) so that some day it will be possible to look up some random specimen & locate it -or at least where it should be- quickly.

Yesterday I wrapped up Cornaceae.  Most of our samples in this family are actual Cornus whatever (Cornus drummundii, Cornus nuttallii, Cornus sanguinae & so forth).  & most of the Cornus themselves are Cornus florida.  Yes, yes the herbarium is in Florida, but most of these are from trees that never were.  Besides the "florida" in a botanical name means flowering & is not intended as a regional designation. 

It is impressive how unremarkable the wood alone of this favorite tree is.  Don't get me wrong, it is a nice looking wood, gentle rings, subtle shading.  After years spent in a wood collection I have developed an affinity for these things & I can tell you the dogwood is lovely in an unremarkable way.  Because that is what these are:  dogwoods.  Imagine my astonishment to learn this tree is actually listed as threatened or endangered in several of the northern states where it used to be abundant.  it is frequently listed as a "rare native".  That this was not always so is driven home by the sheer volume of specimens from all over the US. 

52 Photos Project: A Day In My Life

I am almost at the end of my year of following along with 52 Photos Project, only two more to go after this one.  I think.  This week it is a day in my life which is not particularly anything really, except I wanted to take all the pictures in an actual day & I am not in the habit of bringing my camera with me. 

Struggle number one:  remember to bring my camera when I walk out the door.  The assignment went up sometime Sunday, it was Thursday before I got my act together.  Maybe this is because Thursdays are more predictable than most as it is my usual on campus day.  But plenty of things happen before that.

The short version is I forgot my camera.  This seemed like an excellent opportunity to learn to use the camera on my phone.  I did take a few pictures of my workspace (nothing thrilling-almost the same as the pictures I took a few weeks ago, except would you believe another floor-to-ceiling cabinet has been added to that center row?), so there is no point in posting my less than spectacular new photos.

But I did manage to take a couple pictures of the work I am doing now (specifically matching old index cards wit wood specimens in drawers that are mostly in order...or were when they were last accessed which was mostly in the mid-80s. 

When I left the herbarium I felt like crap.  This is typical of herbarium days.  Between the chemicals to deter the bugs & the frigid temperature to preserve the specimens, I know I look ridiculous walking to the car.  It takes about that long to warm up & breathe clearly even in the tropics. 

But it turns out there was another reason I felt like crap.  By the time I got home, I could not stop shaking.  At 7:30, I had to go back to campus to pick up A.  I brought Sadie with me & we sat on the hill & watched to door to the loading dock until he came out & said her name.  She went nuts. 

I have been in bed (except when I have been "unwell") since Thursday night & got out jus in time to watch a college basketball game.  Which was an accident, really, that just happens to be when I got up.

So this is all I have to document my day.  It was, aside from being sick, a normal Thursday.

52 Photos Project: Where I Would Take You

When 52 Photos Project put up "Where I Would Take You" I confess, I thought of one particular spot.  I pass it every time I go to the Union Street Farmer's Market (which has not been in Union Street for years now, feel free to interpret that as you will), because I cannot parallel park, I just cannot do it & so I park in the little metered lot at the west end of SE 1st Avenue.  & someday I ill take you there, but this morning I revised to a place I actually have taken people, if they have showed the slightest bit of interest or they are my mother:  The University of Florida Herbarium.

A herbarium, in broad strokes, is to plant specimens what a library is to books.  That's it really, the basic definition of an herbarium. 

I began by helping catalog already existing specimen for the synoptic collection.  Sometimes this cataloging meant removing the plants, roots, dirt & all from the newspaper the collector had placed them in, mounting them on cardstock with label (provided label-I never do identification).  Later, I would take all the mounted specimens & enter them into a very basic database.  The end result as a simple collection that could be used to train anyone on how to handle specimens (me included) & what to expect in general. 

Nowadays I log wood.  It is more exciting than you might think (it would have to be, I know).  But there isn't much to say about it really.  I pull out index cards (yes, index cards) double check the specimen (usually a block of wood) is there. If it is, I enter it into a database file (from which a searchable data base will be built....later) & go to the next card.  At the end of my shift, or whenever I start to feel cramped, I take the pile of cards with MIA specimens & go a-hunting.  The detail details are here, if you are really curious. 

As I do this, I am merging -in a data sort of way- several collections together.  They already co-exist in the room, but now it is possible to look at a list of all the specimens in a single searchable place.  This is a first for many of these, which include, among other things, woods from pre-Hiroshima Japan.  I have also been given general access to a lot of other material, & used them as quilt subjects.  Don't worry, the wood quilt is still on the drawing board but you can see the little gem magnolia, the Victoria water lily & a sampling from the Floristic Inventory of the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, if you wish.

This is my (shared) work space at the herbarium.  It is very cramped but it turns out I am the opposite of claustrophobic.  No, not agoraphobic but I prefer close quarters.  High walls, narrow channels & the smell of old paper do not bother me one bit.  I wasn't kidding about the index cards, there is an hours worth of work sitting right there.  The mirror is so I can check drawers overhead without pulling them all the way out.  With a flashlight in my teeth, I can bounce light into the back of a cabinet another handy technique.  Drawers of wood specimens are very heavy & can be unwieldy & confirming the presence of a specimen without pulling everything over on myself is the best way (but not alas the only way).

Last of all, here are the cabinets themselves.  You can see the weight of the wood in them pulling them slowly apart. 

If you came here & wanted to see something you could not see anywhere else in the world (almost), this is where I would take you.

Blogger's Quilt Festival: Little Gem

I know photos2fabric quilts are ho-hum for some, but I have fallen in love with the technique.  It probably doesn't hurt that I am OBSESSED with the University of Florida Herbarium.    Like the Nymphaeaceae I entered in May 2011, this is a central photo of a specimen collected at the Kanapaha Botanical Garden.

& so, my entry in the May 2012 Blogger's Quilt Festival:  Little Gem.  The central image was printed (by me) on a deskjet, as was the information label on the back (it is the label information from the FLAS # 211550 specimen itself).  The frame is one of my favorite piecing techniques, foundation-free strings.  That's when you make giant sheets of varied-width strips & then cut them on a 45degree angle & then work with all that open bias on every edge (I will give you a hint though, the seams of the strips are actually quite stabilizing; I would rather work with a foundation-free string block than any other block  with just one open biased edge).

The frame is machine quilted but the medallion image is hand stitched.  A friend was kind enough to open her vast embroidery floss collection & we matched the colors in the blossom as closely as we could.

Nymphaeaceae

I have so many many not-quite-finished projects, but when it came time to spotlighting a finished quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival, I could not believe how many of my finished quilts have already been covered in my blog.  Virtually every one I had here that I could take a picture of or had taken a picture before I shipped it off has already been shown here.  With one exception: Nymphaeaceae.

Quite some time ago (yea, I could look it up or I could just move on), a floristic inventory of the local botanical garden was begun & a while after that it was mostly finished; these things are never finished-finished.  As it was wrapping up, the wife of the inventoryer, the guy collecting & identifying one of everything in the garden, & I took a fraction of the digital images & made a quilt for a show at the museum of natural history (they were having a quilting natural fladidah-themed exhibit) & we made this.  Meanwhile, the manager of the collection was doing everything in his power to make things easier for us.  By everything, I mean everything, including re-prioritizing what specimens got mounted & photographed when so we could get the images we needed ASAP & not taking it to heart when they turned out not to be quite what we wanted & oh, could we have this instead?

In the course of this whole process, it became very, Very, VERY clear which image was his favorite.  He used it for buttons on the website, he used it as his screen saver; everywhere he could squeeze it in, he squeezed.  When we finished our main project & started planning our Thanks For All Your Help project there was no other choice. 

As with all the images for our original quilt, I printed the images on 100% cotton using the Bubblejet product & an HP Photosmart printer.  We used a single close up of the primary image for the center of the front & several others that we cut up to incorporate into the sawtooth border.  As patterns go, it is not complex; we wanted to be careful that the quilt layout not clash with the image we were trying to highlight.  For the back, we printed the whole specimen with label.  While not particularly important in terms of the quilt, it is (almost) the most important part to an herbarium manager. The whole thing is less than 30" x 30"

If you want to see the original specimen (kind of) you can search for accession number 214601 thru 214601 at the collection search page.

Hard laurel (not)

I have spent most of the last two months deep in the Boraginaceae family.  Not only would I not want to live there, it is not even a nice place to visit.  The blocks of wood have been, well, blocks of wood, but the notations & alterations to the original records are fatiguing.

It is not unusual for the original index cards to have some things crossed out & other information clearly added later & I am fine with that.   By & large, botanical taxonomy works on an almost glacial timeline (until very recently of course, when that whole DNA thing came into being).    The edits I found in this family, though, they were, well, special.  For example, a complete sub-set originally noted as having been collected in Guatemala were updated to reflect collection in Cuba.  I understand not being quite sure if you are in Brazil or Suriname.  I can imagine collectors listening carefully for Portuguese v Dutch to determine which side of the border they were on.  But Guatemala or Cuba?  One is more than twice the size of the other & the smaller one is a group of islands.  The other is, while not entirely landlocked, certainly not to be confused with an island.

I don't care how drunk you got on/off the plane, at some point during your expedition you will be absolutely sure you are not in one or the other.  If, for example you come across ancient looking pyramids above the water, you are not in Cuba.  You could be many many places other than Guatemala, but Cuba absolutely would not be one of them.  If you climb to the highest point you can find & discover you are in a chain of mountains, again you are not in Cuba.  Guatemala has enough mountains (& pyramids) that you would have a hard time walking straight ahead in any direction for any amount of time without encountering one or the other, so if you do walk straight ahead for a day & sight neither, well, welcome to Cuba.  Or at least to welcome to not-Guatemala.

It seems perfect that confusion reigns here in Boraginaceae.  Because I am not a botanist, I don't even pretend to be one on this blog, when I start to work with a new family I try to find something familiar in it.  Some something to hang by brain on while I get to know the others.  For Boraginacea, up popped borage.  This was both good & bad, because while borage was already known to me, it is unlikely to appear in the wood collection; it can sport woody stems, but it is not widely recognized as a tree.  Or even a shrub.  & by "not widely" I mean "never".   You can see how it would help to first acquaint myself with some specimen I am likely to encounter, but borage was just so easy, what with being right there in the name Boraginaceae, & because it also happens to be the name of the garden gnome that shocked (Shocked!) the officials at last year's Chelsea Garden Show.  Once I made that connection, it was all over as far as finding one more suitable.

& so finding something familiar has not helped as much as it usually does, what with we-don't-know-what-country-we-are-in collectors & my memory latching on to banned lawn ornaments.  Confusion is looking endemic for this family: so far almost 1/2 the specimens that have common names recorded have "laurel" somewhere in them.  You might think, well that should make things easier, but it doesn't.  True laurels are found in the Laurel Family is Lauraceae, making the laurels of Boraginaceae impostors.  Or maybe they are just lost.

Coney Island wood

A long time ago, back in the mists of time, say 2005-ish, C****** announced she hated poetry &  I almost ran the car off the road.  We went straight to the library & I handed her some Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  He really is the best antidote to "my love is like a red red rose" (or as someone who shall remain nameless used to say:  my love is like a dead, dead dog). Don't get me wrong, I like Robbie Burns just fine, but maybe this is an acquired taste.  Like bagpipes.  Or haggis.  & not where a person should begin.  Best to begin with the first thing you put on..ideally.

More recently, I have been helping to put together an exhibit to represent all the herbarium at the Natural History Museum for their big annual fundraiser.  Helping is a slight overstatement, I am putting four maybe five pieces of wood on a table of all kinds of other things, among seven other tables.

The first two woods were more or less assigned.  K*** had an idea about one wood being deceptively heavy & another deceptively light (when in doubt, go tactile).  He had examples, but I thought I could come up with better ones, which had the advantage of being roughly the same dimensions making the whole light versus heavy thing just plain more somehow.

The next two were my choice.   I went with a specimen collected in Japan on September 9, 1940.  No there is nothing oh-so-special about 9/9/1940 except that it is well before 8/6/1945.  The second was a wood I had plain never heard of, never thought of & yet have almost certainly been in contact with.  I am talking about Tabebuia ipe.  See, you have never heard of it either.  Go ahead, google it, I can wait.

There now, you see, colorful flowering tree, family Bignoniaceae, which happens to be right where I am now.  A surprising number of botanists working around me have been mildly surprised how well represented this family is a in a wood collection; it is famous for its vines.  It also has some of the quirkiest cards I have come across thus far.  Still, what does a pretty tree bring to the table, block-of-wood-wise?  It turns out this wood is so dense, it is naturally rot resistant.  It is even naturally flame retardant.  Therefore it is widely used as decking in public areas.  Sooo, if you have ever stepped onto the boardwalk at Coney Island you have stepped on Tabebuia ipe.  Like all schoolchildren back in the day, (I know they don't do this anymore-not on any standardized test), I was taught the history of my own community.  One of the highlights (lowlights) of that is the famous Ringling Brothers Fire.  Maybe this is why I am so interested in Tabebuia ipe.

I don't now what to pick for number five.  I need to come up with something soon, or it will be capped at four.  K*** is leaning towards an attractive wood, but I think attractive wood is all around us.  I would rather choose something interesting.  Alas Cybistax antisyphilitica is too racy for the local gentry.

Cybistax antisyphilitica

Did I mention I am on Bignoniaceae?  Well I am.  & last Thursday I came across a specimen label that made me laugh out loud:  Cybistax antisyphilitica.  But that is not the funniest part; the funniest part is hand written on the card where any special notes might be recorded some one penciled "flower used to make blue dye".  I have since googled away & have not found any claim of the medicinal properties this name would imply. 

This is hardly the first funny name I  have encountered, it is just that it is usually the common names that are so...I guess the word would be graphic.  There's Finger Rot of course, I have written of her before & given the chance she could make you wish your finger would rot & fall off.   Her real name, Cnidoscolus stimulosus does not exactly jump up & down & say "I will make you pay!" On the other hand, considering so many botanical names have to do with whether or not the leaves are arranged in opposite pairs or are flat or the stem is woody or growing in a clump rather than along a more-or-less straight line, maybe just maybe if a botanist opens with "this plant is a Cnidoscolus in the Euphorbiaceae family & the first thing we noticed was how stimulating it is" maybe the rest of us should take notice. 

I am not saying botanists never get these things wrong, antisyphlitica being a possible example.  I say possible because maybe it was the  key ingredient in some pre-sulfa drug treatment.  Maybe it was even effective.  At a minimum, the name tells us what was on someone's mind when the plant was classified.

A thorough birching

I have been bogged down on the Betulaceae for quite a while now.  Not like the Anacardiaceae but still, there is a lot of birch out there.  As a result of all that birch out there, there is a lot of birch in the herbarium wood collection.

Birch trees are the first trees about which I have a specific childhood memory.  There were a few paper birches in the yard of my family's home & the temptation to peel those white strips all the way around could be overwhelming.  I remember brushing the palm of my hand over the frayed edges that had naturally peeled away hoping & hoping not to roll them away just a little bit further.  I remember being told that to do so, all the way around would kill the tree & I wanted so badly to do it anyway.

As it happens paper birches are indeed on the decline; deer & paper manufacturers do not share my conflict of spirit.  This tree was once considered an almost aggressive weed tree (I am quite sure we had them because the white trunks were at least something to look at when all the leaves were gone).  Where you chopped down one birch, three more would grow.  Unless you paved over the entire grove or  drained the adjacent wetland.  As I recall, the birches in our yard preferred lower land & wet feet.

Later in life,  I learned of that other famous birch, John Birch.  For no good reason I seem to get the man confused with another man, John Stuart Mill, which is just, well bizarre.  They are both named John....& so are a gazillion other people past& present that I am able to keep separate from either of them.  This confusion is why I am always Always ALWAYS caught off guard when the John Birch Society does something well, fairly typical for themselves. Most recently it was they have groused about the lack of documentation (their word) that "Clean, safe water is a right for all Americans"  while also biotching because full-on access to guns is  indeed a right of all Americans & they have the documentation.  If only the framers of the Constitution had thought to say "oh by the way, water that is not poisoned, that's good too".  It might help you understand how confused I make myself if I provide John Stuart Mill's most famous quote:  Although it is not true all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.

Which finally brings us to today's word: birching.  Once upon a time it meant a sound whipping, often with a birch whip, hence the "birch" in "birching".  You don't hear that one much any more.  Birching in schools (I am guessing I first encountered this word somewhere along the way with Laura Ingalls Wilder) has gone out of fashion...& I do mean fashion.  Whether it will come back or not I cannot say.   Having been on the receiving end of a particular teacher's targeted malice I would hope not, but having seen first hand what passes for self-discipline (& how one unregulated frosh can incite the whole class) I wonder if there are other options.  So there you are, three old words to use in new (old) ways.

The 12th day of Christmas

Here in the US, Christmas begins when they (the ubiquitous THEY) decide it is time to start selling & ends 12/26-or-so, but in most of the world, Christmas begins December 25th & ends yesterday.  While there were no lords'a'leaping in my world, there was (& still is) an unusually cold weather pattern hanging around.  Being able to see my breathe, wearing every article of clothing I own, the long long night clearly visible in the big windows of our Florida room has brought home the season to me in ways I have not felt it in years.  I could even say decades. It seems only right that I spent the 12th day of Christmas at herbarium with the holly & the ivy.  Well, the holly anyhow-I am up to Aquifoliaceae.

This is not a particularly large family, at least not collection-wise, but unlike so many others it is world-wide.  I ended 2009 with my first specimen from Ireland & spent yesterday tromping through Brazil, Cuba, Surinam & left after cross-referencing multiples of Ilex dahoon, a vigorous Florida native.

On December the 23rd campus was largely deserted.  A & I did not go out to lunch as we usually do when I am on campus.  We would have liked to, but all the on-campus restaurants close when the students are away.  The weather was lovely, I stopped by the farmers market (the only bustling place in the whole town) & walked around the Plaza.

On the 12th day of Christmas it was bitter cold-seriously.  The temperature got up to 50, but mostly hovered around 45.  I am not trying to make this into a macho 45-thats-nothing-here-it is-X contest; I grew up in New England, I know what cold is.  You can say my blood is thin if you like, but I promise you dry cold is just more bearable.  I would take 15 & dry over 35 & humid ANY DAY.  There was also an added factor: one of the turbines was dead & the back-up was dieing & so the 11th & 12th days of Christmas there was no heat on campus, at least none to speak of.  & campus was hopping.

On the 12th day of Christmas I left the well heated herbarium (yup, the only place on campus that seemed to have heat was the part of the building that houses a collection that requires dry cold, satire junkies rejoice) & onto the cold sidewalk where it was wall-to-wall people.  & since I am outside I mean from the wall of that building across the street to the wall of this building over here.

Which means no matter how cold it is, Christmas & winter are over.

How much wood would a botanist log if a botanist would log wood?

I am no botanist. But I am a logger, a data logger. For a few years I have spent a few days/weeks in the Herbarium doing general herbaria chores. Initially I went so I could learn the proper way to collect & record botanical specimens. In return for this training, I was also taught how to mount these specimens & then I was let loose on a decades-old pile of specimens improperly documented that now makes up a good portion of the local synoptic collection.

As I was working my way through the pile, I learned that there was no one, No One in a position to enter this information into a database, thereby making the synoptic collection more available. My new career was born.

More recently I have undertaken the digital recording of the existing wood collections (yes, plural) that have been merged and carefully cross-referenced....on index cards.

Last semester I finished the Acanthaceae. They made up about an inch & a half of index cards. I have now been working on the Anacardiaceae for what seems like a lifetime. I have recently arrived at poison ivy. Guess what still has toxic oils even after 60+ years in a cabinet? At five to nine months or so a drawer, I am looking at job security for the next several years. If only they were paying me, but you cannot have everything.

I have talked with a few friends who used to have paid work & now have no work but eschew volunteer work & I admit it leaves me stumped. How can it possible be better (for your resume, for your psyche, I would say for your self esteem except I do not actually believe in self esteem as defined by our culture), how can it possible be better to just wait; maybe you could reconsider? Why not do something while you are waiting? & you never know, you might meet your future employer while volunteering.- your volunteer job might become paid. This happened to one of the herbarium volunteers & could have happened to me but I would rather...set my own schedule. Yeah, that's it.

Sooooo if you have been not getting in touch with your local volunteer center because: you need to be available (if only cell phones had been invented), you do not want to make a commitment you cannot keep (no one ever heard of a temporary volunteer job), you want to use this time to catch up on things around the house (it can take weeks to dust behind the fridge; it takes me years), please take some of your busy, full day & think about doing something that does not remind you of what you are not doing.

Evil empires in wood

I am ssssssllllllloooooooowwwwwwwllllllllyyyyyyy working my way through the card catalog that is the only current record of all the wood specimens at the herbarium. This is how it goes:

-I take a card.

-I figure out which of two-five numbers on it refers to the herbariums own number.

-I look through the drawers, boxes, etc. (some in the room I usually work in, others in "the old wood room").

-I find the probable specimen & then I use something else to confirm I am indeed looking at the specimen referenced (a collectors number, a genus or common name, etc.).

-I mark the back of the card with the correct herbarium number so that when I get run over by a truck & all the computers simultaneously erase their databases, my worthy successor will know what has & has not been checked.

-I sit down at the computer & start recording the information from the card. Would you believe this is where it gets time consuming?

Not all of the cards are organized along the same lines. It is safe to say there are five major systems & I could not even guess how many minor ones. They mostly record the name of the specimen; collector's number &/or name or not; the date the specimen was collected or not; the location from which the specimen was collected or not or maybe the name &/or location of the organization that provided the specimen. All of this would be as nothing if each card had this information in the same order. They do not.

Still some systems have distinct hallmarks, frequent places from which specimens are collected, frequent co-collectors. Certain record keepers always put particular information in particular places & I have started to recognize their handwriting. & typewriters. But still I would be lost without GOOGLE, GOOGLE translate & WIKI-Species. There are a slew of more specific archives on-line but often my question can only be handled by a cross-reference between all three. For example when Sandwich appeared on one card for a particular variety of palm only this trinity could help me figure out what Sandwich was the person who collected the plant? the collection in England from which it was donated? Nope. Sandwich was the island on which it was native, the only island on which it was native. & in the very valuable index this would have been almost impossible to find out because not only has the palm changed names but so has the island.

It would be easy to get bogged down in the stories of the specimens. It has happened to me before. I spent a sad month in 2006 mounting plant pressings gathered by a father & son team in October & November of 1941. Then there was a gap until the father alone started to submit specimens again in 1944. He collected on off until the early 1960's, but always alone. There is a lot of information in what is missing on those old typed labels.

For the past couple of weeks it has been beautiful wood specimens from some of the most frightening places on earth. These are the places nightmares are made of. The first was a row of wooden blocks labeled "Queensland". It would be easy to assume Australia but it would be wrong. This Queensland is long gone from western thought, except perhaps in Orwellian Literature classes. The second were specimens all collected in South Africa in the 1950s. The third was the single specimen from Rwanda.

I am sure none of what happened was anacardiacaea's fault. It is just a plant, a good-sized family of plants in fact. A family that includes poison ivy. & pistachios.

Tread softly

A couple week-ends ago, while A cut up the pine tree that went down in the storm while he was away, I dug up the Tread Softly that had grown up around it. In the end he was horribly bitten by fire ants & I could have left the plant alone. But it has to come out, it is nothing but trouble & this really is the best time of year.

I am fond of the crazy common names of plants. I like it when different plants have the same name. I like it when the same plant has different names. I like the old european names, the patently native american names, the absurd moshes of the two. I like them all. But hands down, Tread Softly just might be my favorite. Favorite name, that is.

It is hard to say when I first encountered this plant, but I can tell you she does not improve with familiarity. The specimens collected over 100 years ago still need to be handled with gloves. So far at least, the poison never dies.

She is a hardy girl, surviving sun & drought but definitely preferring tempered shade. Tread Softly grows densest where it is hardest to pull, beneath fallen trees for example, or immediately under fence lines. I wear a pair of gloves that have been soaked & shrunk to my hands through use, the leather is dense & tight & in the course of three or fours hours work at least half-dozen tiny little spines worked their way into my fingers. & there was no continuing until the spine had been pulled back out.

From a distance, she is rather lovely. Rich dark green leaves, truly white flowers , not cream not yellow (at least not until the specimen has been aged). Clear & dramatic leaf shape. Unmistakable. & untouchable.

Still every spring I am tempted to press just a few. Get them under glass where they cannot be touched & just be admired. What stops me is knowing that in the time from when I first collect the plant until the specimen is sufficiently dry to go under glass, I will be vulnerable. Those spears will make their way from the press in my workroom to every other room in my house. & long after the originals are gone from the press I will find myself stabbed with yet another barb that somehow got left behind.

//while writing this I learned it is also called Finger Rot. I kinda like that, too.

My world IS flat

I do not remember when I started flattening things. But I do remember when I started doing things with the results. We were living in Joisey, more or less at the Route 46/I-75 junction. In this complete absence of anything not man-made I was fascinated by the variety of foliage in the drainage ditches. Within a couple months I would pullover & randomly press plants I found ANYWHERE. Lucky for me, A has absolutely no problem flying across lanes of traffic so I can hop out & get a snip of leaf or bloom or bark.

Earlier this year I made my return to the Herbarium on campus to begin the cross-reference of the Wood Collection. An herbarium for those who do not know is a library of plant specimens. It was here I learned there is a right way to press plants (& I was mostly doing it) & a wrong way to record information (& I was doing that, too).

I was fortunate to have access to the images I did when Kathy & I made this quilt "Floristic Inventory of Kanapaha Botanical Gardens" (originally exhibited at the Florida Museum of Natural History in 2006) & compulsive enough to record the information from the source labels on the back (with legend).

It has been a few years (wow! years) since I saw this quilt, it has been traveling off&on & I do not own it, so I do not see it between trips, either. As I look at these old pictures I wonder that A never once suggested that perhaps I needed a psych referral. Instead he listened patiently while I explained the intricacies of digitally recreating the shadows behind the native grape for reproduction on fabric. Lucky for him he can sleep with his eyes open.

Seriously, what was I thinking?