"The Plant Kingdom: Born-Again Botanist"

Mike Schroeder

I like to call myself a "born-again botanist." For me, there is no holier text than trees, lichens, seeds, the whole panoply of the plant kingdom and their close relatives. My love of botany (studying, observing, teaching, trying to conserve) is what gives structure to my life: a purpose, rules to live by, and a powerful sense of connection to what is beyond myself.

This is a recent development in my life. I studied French, not botany. As an elementary school teacher I rarely taught about nature. I walked the woods and gardened, but I saved my sense of wonder for my own children and myself. There seemed small place for it in such a busy world.

Then one day 10 years ago I visited the Garden in the Woods in Framingham, home of the New England Wildflower Society. There was a bulletin board there of programs. Suddenly I discovered a whole community of people who not only shared my private passion for the beauty in bushes and weeds, but made whole careers out of it.

I took course after course and tramped behind botanists who were besotted with ferns or grasses or mosses or giant trees on steep hillsides. Soon woods and meadows, marshes and swamps, even weedy lawns became to me places of high adventure and aesthetics.

Where once at the edge of my lawn I had seen just alders, now I saw alders, swamp rose, arrowwood, dogwood, maleberry, blueberry, winterberry and buttonbush, each with its season of flower and fruit, as the birds and beetles have always known. I'm a menace on the highway. I love to study what grows in the prairie conditions of highway medians and identify the hickories, maples, poplars, and oaks as they fly past my car window. Even sandpits and parking lot islands have admirably stalwart pioneers with their own stark beauty and the occasional spectacular flower, like the tiny blue curl or the intricate henbit. But I have so much more to treasure than the names and beauty of form. For most every plant I see, I am beginning to know its family of relatives, near and far, and long ago. I am learning its community of companions, both flora and fauna, and what it has meant to my own species. And I can trace the whole sequence of its life's events.

I have learned so much ‹indeed, I have learned to be amazed at how little I know, appalled at how many people know even less I do, and disheartened at the damage our ignorance coupled with power and perceived economic need can do. Often I feel like a  tiny voice by a busy highway whispering that I know something really wonderful and important.

I feel compelled to proselytize.

I've had the great pleasure of being a children's guide and a school naturalist-in-residence. And I have been thrilled by the keen interest I¹ve seen young children develop in trees and flowers and their ecologies when teachers and parents show they care.

 I've also seen what happens when adults do not model respect for wild plants and creatures. As one example, across from John Paun Athletic Park in Lakeville a stand of Turk's Cap lilies leans out toward the playing field in mid summer. The players and their parents toss snack wrappers and plastic cups in among them. I worry our children will grow up to regard wild vegetation as waste, rather than living things with stories of their own - the hazelnut with its red flower in March and September nut, the catbrier where sparrows can hide, and the pathrush that thrives beneath our feet.

I want to tell these stories, so I lead nature walks and teach adults or children whenever opportunity or time allows. Come along on my walks the first Saturday of the month and I'll tell the stories to you.

 What I have learned has made me keenly aware of the natural space around me. I feel responsible for it and want to shape the human impact to protect its health.

 Near my former home a builder clear-cut and bulldozed and blasted 50 acres of rocky wooded hillside to get the maximum number of house lots. Native species were replaced with acres of lawn grass that will sustain no other life but Japanese beetle grubs. Exotic plants were brought in, some that will seed into the thin border of remaining woods, seriously changing the
diet of the creatures who live there.

I am concerned that much of our most pristine habitat seems to be disappearing into the second-home market. A fishing village I used to visit when I was a child was surrounded by little vine-draped bayous with cypress trees. Developers
bought it, and the residents all disappeared, probably with what must have seemed like a lot of money in their pockets. The bayous were dredged, straightened, and the land cleared and replanted. It is now a gated second-home community with orderly gardens of exotic ornamental grasses. There is little trace of the community of plants and animals who once lived there or of the people who were able to be part of their space.

Most all of our world is managed or influenced by human activity. How I would love it if we did it in such a way that we could live with full awareness and appreciation among a great complexity of wild species.

I am trying to be of influence in my home town as a member of the Open Space Committee and the Conservation Commission, but I know my first responsibility is to the property 3 River Bend in Lakeville, deeded to my husband and myself.

A gardener and writer named Sara Stein tells in a book called Noah's Garden what she has done with her 6 New York State acres, studying the natural conditions and planting native species as they actually grow in the wild. She points out how even small yards planted her way could create marvelous habitat and corridors for wildlife. I visited her garden and fell in love with it. My own garden reaches toward her standard with every aster and amelanchier I plant. I have a long way to go, but I'm trying to nurture what is growing here already and to fill it with a rich variety of all the things that grow and have grown along rivers in Southeastern Massachusetts.

 My garden is no peaceable kingdom - the foxes eat the wrens, the grape tries to strangle the blueberry, and the alien autumn olive lurks, plotting to engulf it all. I manage it, but I am certainly not God here. I haul compost and move plants about, but I watch and wait and learn and marvel at the insects, frogs, and flowers. Sometimes it feels to me like heaven on earth. And perhaps that is just what it is.

"The Pleasure of Eating"

Kimberly French
 

Reading:

Wendell Berry is an essayist, poet, novelist, and a farmer in Kentucky, who writes about rural America and its decline. The following is an excerpt from his essay ³The Pleasures of Eating.²

...[E]ating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as consumers. ....

The food industrialists have...persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. ...

The industrial eater is...one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore ... passive and uncritical ...

[In his book The Soil and Health Sir Albert Howard writes] that we should understand ³the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject.² Eaters ... must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world ... and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. ...

Though I am by no means a vegetarian, I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. ... I like to eat vegetables and fruits that I know have lived happily and healthily in good soil, not the products of huge, bechemicaled factory-fields. ...

The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing... The knowledge of the good health of the garden .... means that you can eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one¹s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.

Eating with the fullest pleasure is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

'The Animal Kingdom: Wild Conservationist"

Tricia Sittig

Woody Allen once said: "I am at two with the Universe. " In a simple 7‑word sentence, he points out how ludicrous it is for us to believe we are separate from nature.

WHAT IS IT ABOUT NATURE THAT MAKES ME REACT SO STRONGLY TO PROTECT IT?

During my teenage years, I had two spiritual experiences which contributed significantly to my desire to save wildlife in all forms. Those stories are long‑winded, so ask me back another time. (wink, wink)

So, why protect nature? Quite frankly, I need it for my own survival. If I could see only humans each day, I would die ... no offense. I need the peace and quiet, the perspective of the fields, the silence of the forest, the feel and smell of the wind through the pine trees. I want to save these places for my family's sanity and health, and because of the deeply engrained belief (passed down from my parents) that life is better when more animals and plants are alive.

Why do I feel this way? I think it has to do with imagination and spontaneity. The man‑made world of lawns, driveways, cookie‑cutter houses and strip malls feels deadly to me. There is no imagination, no surprise ‑ all our cities look and feel alike.

  also has to do with Choice. Yes, the cultural, architectural, linguistic, and travel options in a city are endless and fascinating. But after a short visit, I personally find myself yearning for the wildlife, the peace and quiet, and for the creature languages in all their creative forms, tones, and qualities. Each of my homes has bordered wild land ... overgrown tree lots, forgotten State forests, fields left fallow, paths leading to ponds or lakes. I have consistently chosen to be near these wild places, because a chance meeting with a wild creature is possible and cherished. If they "pave over Paradise and put up a parking lot" as the song goes, the choice to be in the natural world will be GONE.

 It has to do with integrity. Wildlife forms are natural and wild, and act according to their innate forces. There is no being shaped, trained or controlled by human minds, hands or machines. Nature survives for its own sake, in a glorious manifestation of complementary skills, diverse beyond our imagination, with taking more than it needs. After billions of years, it has not destroyed it's own precious balance Listen to what Walt Whitman says in "Song Of Myself", chapter 32:

I stand and look at them long and long.
I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self‑contained,
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

 WHO AM I SPENDING TIME WITH ON THIS NATURE‑SAVING JOURNEY?

 I am grateful work with two groups which feel the same love Of the natural world as I do, and wish to protect it from the assault of destruction. One is the Wildlands Trust of Southeastern Massachusetts, a private, non‑profit land trust. My work has been to share land‑saving options with Berkley landowners who wish to protect, rather than sell their land. For three years, I have been privileged to serve on its Board, which is responsible for saving over 6000 acres of land which will be protected forever. You'll find a display and brochures downstairs.

 The Open Space and Recreation Subcommittee of Berkley is a small, dedicated group of volunteers who have spent almost three years writing a plan according to State guidelines. If accepted, it allows us to apply for grant money to be used to save land in Town for habitat preservation or for recreation purposes. One cannot do this work alone. To save the land which is being sold off lot by lot, and gravel pit by gravel pit, takes such effort, coordination and knowledge of regulations that it is not for the weak of heart. In fact, in the two months that we've worked on this worship service, Berkley has lost to "developers" 2 large, beautiful, parcels of land, which had been identified in our Open Space Plan as 'priorities to save". Grieving is a significant part of this work, I'm afraid. Without these groups who wish to- be the advocates for the creatures without voices, I would feel completely hopeless. But we have work to do, and miles to go before we sleep.

 WHAT DO I SUGGEST TO YOU? Here are some don'ts: Don't allow one‑word sound bytes to determine how you feel about an issue. We say "environment" as if it is separate from us. "Weather" has become something we report on and react to, rather than stand in awe of. The term "sustainability" is seen as suspect. For heaven's sake, why isn't it worthwhile to ask this question: Assuming that we'd like to survive, HOW would we need to behave in order that the earth could continue to provide food, water and shelter for the billion of us? "Biodiversity" is not a dirty word. In the same way that you don't allow racist or sexist comments to go unchallenged, don't allow people to belittle important constructs which reflect biological integrity and therefore, survival.

 HERE ARE SOME DO's: The Western world is disconnected from the, natural world, in which we had lived intimately from the first hominids until the industrial revolution. We sit in front of TV's and computers and wonder what we are missing. Maybe we are missing the third dimension, and the five senses. Get outside and get reconnected to birds, rain, lilac bushes and neighbors.

 Get a kitten and love it. Receive its love. When you cry, be grateful that it curls up next to you and doesn't say something stupid like "the sun will come out tomorrow."

Watch a honey bee get nectar from a flower, and be in awe that she has to make 43,000 trips to produce one teaspoon of honey. Let that honey drip on your tongue, and baste its mysterious sweetness (analysts have been able to identify only 98% of its ingredients).

Be open to the mysterious, allow yourselves to be taught by the natural world, touch it, listen to it, be joyful. Understand deep inside that nature is the prey and the predator cycle, the cycle of life and death, decomposition and back to life again, and realize that we are NOT separate from that cycle. Pick the part you feel most closely allied to and allow yourselves to be led to whatever is the next step for you. Despite all the difficulties and pain, it is a worthwhile journey.