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: 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.

Welcoming the Judas Tree

It started a bit more than a week ago; the tree that had been plain gray branches began forming small dense reddish-pinkish clusters.  Exactly a week later, those clusters had swelled & begun to look like beads of wax.  & then yesterday, it really began to bloom.

Cercis canadensis is actually in the legume family (that's right- peas & pulses), but it is a tree.  & what a tree!  Although the top of its habitat is in New Jersey & the western-most point in Texas, I had not seen redbud -or certainly not in enough abundance to remember- until we moved to Florida.  Now I cannot get enough of them.  They can be hard to find, mostly because they are fast-enough growing that the plant sold by nurseries rarely looks like much.

Do not be deceived by descriptions with words like "weedy"; this is a healthy happy tree.  There are not many widespread applications & virtually none are commercially viable (except as an ornamental & then it gets low marks for that because the flowering period is brief).

Apparently a springtime shower of flowers,  a food source for wildlife & shade in the hot summer is just not enough to make a tree worthwhile to the landscaping public.  You can keep your endlessly flowering trees, those deciduous things that really only lose their leaves when the new ones push through, & everything else you can find in every nursery.  I will be napping under the Judas Tree.

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.