The problem with field guides
You know, there’s just one problem with field guides.
Let me back up a moment. If you’re a person who likes to walk or hike and you spend some time in places where wildflowers grow, sooner or later it’s going to happen. Something's going to catch your eye and you’re going to stop. You’re going to bend over and take a really good look at some lovely bit of plant matter.
Don’t beat up on yourself that you’ve been walking right by this thing a while – for years, for decades even – and you somehow never took a moment to really observe it. Never mind that, until this moment, all you registered was “white thing” or “blue thing” or “isn’t that pretty?” going by in a blur. It happens. Anyway, this is a famously distracted age.
The point is there comes a moment when you decide this blur must be attended to. Don’t ask me why this seems to strike many of us, mostly women, sometime mid-40s or so but it does. All I know is it’s just not good enough any more not to stop and take a look, a really good look, and wonder, “What is that?”
If you’re like me, you’ll eventually go in search of the answer as likely as not in a field guide. Because once your curiosity has been piqued, your consciousness penetrated, your habitual distraction overcome, you have to know what that is. You want names. You want facts. This is no time to be vague.
But you won’t be satisfied with just one answer. You’ll want more. Once you’ve identified that, you’ll want to know what this purple stuff is and that yellow stuff that’s everywhere and is that pink stuff indeed some sort of rose?
You may carry your field guide with you. You may take photos to go home and compare. I spent all one spring and summer getting the names in my head, only to lose them over the fall and winter. It took several years of pouring the sand in, having it leak out again before the trickier names finally stuck for good.
Several years on, here comes the problem with field guides. They don’t answer my questions any more. Oh, I still use them to jog the memory and clarify some detail. But to be comprehensive enough to be useful, guides are necessarily brief. They provide the thumbnail sketch when I want a whole biography.
So, that’s why I decided to write this blog – to fill in the details that field guides and compendia and other encyclopedic references don’t have room for. I also hope to tackle questions that botanists and other experts find too rudimentary even to consider. You’ll learn as I learn and I will try to provide photographs to learn with and enjoy.
Check out some of my wildflower photos here.
