Judith Chalmer

One of the puzzles that intrigues me lately has grown out of my simultaneous interest in and resistance to learning botanical names or even identifying species. On the one hand it’s wonderful to know as much as possible about the lives of living things. Many thanks to Kate Kreusi for help identifying the species in the Intervale named in “Abundance, 2020.” The common names of plants are often imbued with story, implied or explicit, and a delight to the musical ear. It can be a huge pleasure to peruse a field guide for language alone. On the other hand, when I’m walking or paddling in natural settings, I am not that interested in cataloging. I’m interested in an associative, intuitive, and emotional process, a personal engagement with the forms and the movement around me. I think it’s essentially a beginner’s problem. It reminds me of students who might resist, at first, the process of revising poetry because it takes them out of the intuitive. But, of course, the more writers revise, the richer the intuitive process becomes. I imagine I would have a similar experience if I devoted myself to botanical identification. In the past year I have begun to study animal tracking, and already it has affected my relationship with the plant world as a good deal of animal sign appears above ground level. Whose claws left those holes in the bark of that tree? Who has bitten this branch at just that particular angle? Who stripped off a line of bark here? Who opened those nutshells in just that way and left them here and not there? Who lives under that tip up? I’m not very good at remembering who makes which kinds of print in the snow, but I’m better at noticing gait, who was loping, who was hopping, who paused and sat? My guess is, the way for me to become more knowledgeable about plants is somehow within this process of finding a story, of watching for the behavior of the plants rather than naming their components. But where to start? Today a crew of tiny seed puffs grabbed a ride on the midnight ruff of my dog, and he ran off with a garland of stars…