The botanist, the artist, and the book of what remains (Excerpt)
We have devoted ourselves to building a catalogue of earthly delights; we have made it our quest to find, name, describe, and draw the natural world; to trace the edges of biodiversity as species slip from existence; an artist and a botanist endeavoring to witness with our full attention.
Our hunt leads us through marshes, fields, hillsides, in wider and wider loops around the valley, and finally, to a patch of morels hidden in plain sight at the base of two dead elms by the waterfront, in front of the abandoned treatment plant. Twelve shriveled brain-blobs, poking up out of the grass. We set a few aside to study, toss the rest into a pan, and spread spoonfuls of buttered fungus on toast for dinner, moaning our appreciation. Then we stay up late reading scientific articles about the speciation of Morchella. We think we’ve found our species: Morchella ulmaria, though we haven’t ruled out prava or cryptica. We dissect one of our specimens into quarters, scrape the edge with a double-edged razor blade, smear the spores on a glass slide, and take turns peering through the compound scope—one of four microscopes set up temporarily in this small apartment during the pandemic…. Under the scope, the interior surface of the morel glistens, and I feel like a spelunker who has just discovered a cave filled with crystalline minerals. This midnight hour of fevered research is as delicious as the mushrooms themselves—naming and studying is the reward of the hunt.
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...While you’re away, on a research trip to study fossilized ferns in the Southwest, I keep myself busy in the East…. I catalogue flora and fauna specimens to document and share with you from afar—this is my love language—here, a dead bat in the grass, its body transformed into mush by ants, but its wings still intact, paper-thin translucence framed by delicate bones. Here, a myriad of alien bodies: chanterelles in the moss, puffballs on a log, and a choir of backlit oyster mushrooms singing their spores into the wind. Here, a minuscule aphid with fluorescent green skin and a spiked tail, bobbing up and down on my notebook as though he’s dancing for us.
...When we’re together, I have a living botanical encyclopedia at my fingertips. If you're not walking next to me on a trail in the woods, clutching at my elbow, enthusiastically pointing to a spring ephemeral bloom poking through the still frozen mud, a snowdrop or bloodroot perhaps, though you would use their scientific names—if you’re not by my side, I send you photos of the flora and fauna which stumps me and you respond with immediate results.
Once, while I’m traveling on a work trip to San Antonio, traveling from the land of snowy gutters to the land of humid gardens, and you’re down in Central America teaching a month-long botany course, I send you a string of photos of scarlet blossoms, purple leaves, speckled moths. You reply, "Dermatophyllum secundiflorum - Texas mountain laurel," and I blush and grin like a fool as your messages roll in, "Ailanthus webworm! I love that moth. Tillandsia recurvata —grows in Oaxaca as well. And that little purple guy is lantana, and you have bougainvillea and tradescantia..."
I describe a choir of vocal morning birds, and for once I know their names, I can join the conversation, "grackle, magpie, cardinal, turtle dove," and in this manner, the morning song unfolds between the poet and the botanist, separated by distance but linked by the joy we take in naming.
It’s maddening when I find an odd plant that I can’t name, and you’re not around to tell me the story of this strange fern with branching fronds, or this tree with shiny blue fruit. The berries wear red, star-shaped hats, like court-jesters. For now, I’ll call it the bubblegum tree, but this nickname is a poor substitute for your Latin names. Or, maybe I don’t need the names, I need you, standing next to me in this stranger’s garden. I want to see you pick a leaf and pull it close to your face, tenderly, like all that matters in the world are the floral curiosities of a walk in the woods.
I look for you in the Arboretum. I know I won’t find you here, but the next best thing to holding you is to sink my fingertips into the soft, rain-soaked bark of the Redwoods. I look for you in the clusters of tiny periwinkle fruits of the beauty-berry bush. I ask the hummingbird high on a wire above my head if he has seen you, but he zips away without a word. Mount Hood shines, crisply blue, through a window of branches, and I squint into the sun to trace the edges of the volcano with my eyes until they burn. I crumple bay leaves under my nose so that their pungent air will distract me from my longing. It doesn’t work.
...You propose that we write a book—you’ll write the outline and I will illustrate it. Once the idea has been spoken aloud, it infects all of our conversations. During every walk we take in the woods or even around town, you grab my arm enthusiastically and point out the various parts of plants. We examine the leaves of elderberry bushes, willow catkins, lamb’s quarters, artemisia, hasta flowers—no leaf is left unturned. It doesn’t matter if we ever actually sit down to write this book, or any others—it’s these shared moments of research and learning that I treasure, this mutual celebration of knowledge.
The season of leaves passes, and our fevered leaf-peeping, sketching, and botanical diagramming slows to a drip. Winter is the time to make lists and sketches in preservation of the season of bounty. We collect these names so as not to forget. We draw every detail of every leaf, spine, and bulb to keep track of the species lost to time and human error. We write to honor and describe the seeds and specimens we have been able to save, and everything that continues to grow, despite it all.
Frances Cannon lives in Vermont, where she teaches at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and the Vermont Commons School. Read more.