Botany 101

Patrick Loafman

 

Consider the common clover. They’re iconic. They’re rooted in our childhood psyche where we eternally search for the rare and lucky four-leaved ones.

As a botanist, I know clovers are in the genus Trifolium meaning three leaves, and in the Fabaceae family, so they’re related to peas. Pick out one flower and examine it. It’s strange and beautiful and unique, but at the same time, looks a bit like a pea flower.

If it’s in the pea family, then where are the pea pods? You have to search. Look even closer. Peel away the wilted flower and there it is. Tiny, roundish, dark and hidden, not resembling a pea pod at all. They have only one or two seeds, and these pods remain closed, dropping like coins to the ground with no one noticing.

It took me over fifty years to do this, to pull off the petals, discover what it held within. Only then did I realize there was much more to clovers than just three leaves, more than what Family and Genus they’re in.

I’m sitting cross-legged in the dirt in a closed campground beside a fire pit. I’m here studying clovers. But if you saw me you, a gray-bearded man with long tangled hair, face inches from the ground, staring intensely at apparently nothing, you might think “something is wrong with that guy.” If you had children, you might steer them the other way, just to be safe.

I have a tee-shirt that sometimes helps. It says “I may look like a hippie, but I’m really a friendly field biologist.” There are daisies on the shirt also.

I’ve had police and park rangers approach me with caution as I’m sitting in a ditch along the highway, entranced by a flower so small most people cannot see it, or on a gravel road pullout amid shotgun shells and dog shit, lost inside a sedge. The officers always ask the same question.

“Can I help you?”

What I want to reply is: “If you’re really good at sedges, can you tell me if this is Carex pachystachya or Carex micropoda.” But I know their question is really code for “Are you a lost hippie and do I need to grab my Billy club?” If this would only happen when I have my tee-shirt on, I could just point to it.

The shirt was made by a fellow botanist who is an expert in mosses and liverworts and lichens. I was working for her on a plant study, and the last big trip of the year was a seven day hike up the Elwha River, up and over the Olympic Mountains, and out the other side, down the Quinault Valley.

I was working with a guy called “Digger” because he was a grave digger in high school. He also played football, so he was a strong young guy, but had a sore knee from doing field work that summer. We were at the Hayes Ranger Station, a historic log cabin some eighteen miles up the trail. We were on the porch looking at our maps, deciding where we will go to tomorrow and whether Digger’s knees were going to give him problems, when a woman appeared. She wandered in the tall grass beside the cabin, looking down, and because I do that sort of thing all of the time, I didn’t think much about it. She’s probably a botanist, I thought. Eventually she asked us where we were going, and I told her we were hiking up the Elwha and out the Quinault.

“Oh,” she said, then wandered off.

That fall the park superintendent got a long letter from a visitor who said she saw a “hippie in the woods” who “seemed lost, didn’t know where he was or where he was going!” She claimed “he didn’t even have a map and I was frightened for him!” and later admitted she was also “frightened of him.” She concluded that if he was a park employee, then they should be concerned for his safety.

The usual Park Service hippies were investigated, but none were at Hayes at that time. My season was over when the park biologist called asking if I was there, and the “I’m not a hippie” tee-shirt was born. For a short while that winter it was “a thing” at the park. A few other biologists got the same tee-shirt, and an older entomologist had a similar shirt made saying, “I might look like a biologist, but I’m really a hippie.”

Hippie. Just say the word and you have an image: long hair, beard, beads. Or you might think: the sixties, marijuana, electric guitars. The name became mainstream after it was used by a journalist, but the word hip once described the beatniks, and originally coined by African Americans in the thirties associated with early jazz, the jive era. Gather a roomful of hippies and you might see only the similarities at first, but look again, and you’ll start seeing differences, as you would with any group of people.

Just like clovers. The image most people have of a clover is a singular thing, but there are about two hundred and fifty species in the world. The name clover has its origin in word “cleaved,” meaning their leaves are divided into three leaflets. And sometimes a fourth. Most people live happy lives without looking any further than those leaves, but if you do, the differences start emerging. Maybe subtle at first, but after a while, many species emerge from that singular word clover, leaving you to wonder why you’ve never seen them all before.

As I sit in this campground, I’m surrounded by four species of clover within arm’s reach. At my feet, beside a cigarette butt ringed with lipstick, is a clover that looks like it’s been sat on, squashed flat. Its flowers are wilted, brown, don’t even look much like flowers, and because they have no stalks, they’re right on the ground, resembling a small pile of detritus. Familiar clover leaves surround the pile of spent flowers.

I lie down with my face less than an inch from this suffocated clover. “Suffocated,” because the flowers are so tightly packed that they’re gasping for breath. With my hand-lens, I travel across the minute browned landscape. It feels like I’m flying over desert scrub.

To my right is the teasel clover, taller and more colorful, and to my left is the nodding clover, with its flower head slightly bent towards the ground, and beside that is the clustered clover whose globose flower head looks spiny, like a medieval ball on a chain, though it’s not spiny at all to touch, and of course, there’s no chain.

All of these species are non-native, mere weeds, and because of that status, many botanists might pass by them. But to me, right now, they’re extravagant little gems, things of wonder, filling me with awe. Some may say this feeling is something metaphysical or spiritual, but it has nothing to do with spirits, and is completely grounded in dirt and blossom and leaf; a feeling coming from pure physical reality, of paying careful attention, of really seeing the beauty present, right here, right now. You don’t have go to a sanctuary, or climb a remote mountain to discover beauty, to find peace, it’s everywhere.

I had the same feeling earlier today when I found the small-headed clover on a beach, and a couple of days ago when I found some few-flowered and tomcat clovers—all of these species are native and uncommon. It’s been a big clover week. But there are a total of twenty-five species in the Coast Range of Washington alone, and I still have only seen fifteen of them, so I still have lots to see. My head is swelling as these small flowers make a home inside my brain, swelling like a clover pod forever hidden within its wilted flower.

If you walked by right now you might not notice all the clover excitement going on. You might not even see any flowers, or if you do, you might call them weeds, something ugly to be pulled out of the ground. Or you might just see a hippie rolling in the dirt and cigarette butts.

Maybe you’d write a letter.

Or maybe, just maybe, something would happen, something elemental, a change in your perception, and you’d strip away layer upon layer what has taken a lifetime to wrap tightly around your eyes, so you can see so clearly that it hurts, and you find yourself falling to the earth, falling all the way back into childhood’s arms, where everything is vibrant and new. This is the secret reason for learning botany. It forces your eyes open.

“It can be overwhelming,” I might say to you, as now, you roll in the dirt beside me, becoming smaller and younger with each breath.

 

Patrick Loafman is a writer and a biologist. “Botany 101” is from a manuscript of essays that he wrote over a three-year span following his life and reflections as a biologist in the field. He is also author of the novel, Somewhere Upriver and two chapbooks of poetry.