By Ben Lemmond
“Be not concerned,” Dr. Cathy Paris advises us, in a soft, lilting voice that could outsparkle Glinda the Good Witch: the twenty-page packet on graminoids that she’s just handed us is “mostly diagrams.” In it we see the somewhat archaically-classified “tribes” of grasses. One can imagine them roving across the land in waves, heads nodding in some ancient agreement (“May our lemmas always be longer than the lowest glume…” “Yes, yes, it is so.”) Every Wednesday, which is Field Botany day in my world, my cohort and I spend a full, 9-5 day with Cathy Paris and Liz Thompson addressing the nuances of the botanical world with direct, unabashedly precise language, squinting along as we’re steered from spikelet to achene to tubercle in an ever-zooming lens of detail.
This is the class that feels most like learning a foreign language. Specifically, there’s an overload of new terminology with no real-life reference points: words you simply have to memorize, because they only attach to one, very specific meaning that exists nowhere else except deep inside the maze of plant anatomy. To actually retain this language requires a little reinforcement, a task that I’m sure we’ve all approached differently. I’ve taken to drawing everything in class because it’s the only way to add dimension to the detail, to take its foreignness and make it familiar. I tried to do that in a different class, our Friday “Field Practicum” class, where we visit sites and decipher the whole story – and it just didn’t work to turn into images. The puzzles of the sites we visit may be bigger in scope, but the way we solve them somehow doesn’t necessitate the translation of a sketch. Perhaps it’s because patching together narratives from imperfect fragments is what social creatures like ourselves are expertly designed to do. At any rate: a few images of class and sketches from my botany notebook, a world I’ve made for myself to remember:
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