With the full fall of autumn turning into winter, work in my journal progresses with less completion. Instead trapped inside, I return to images collected from field days and work with them in larger format. For once, I can relish the relative sedentary of the cold season. Freed from the incessant need to see what is happening outside, I can play with colour and line, form and shadow. Aspen shadows results.
This last Saturday, the second-year Ecology class (Biol 2170) ventured into the convoluted geometry of one of the few remaining cottonwood stands along the South Thompson River. Working with Tod Haughton from BC Parks, our purpose was to document cottonwood regeneration (the number of seedlings and saplings) in relation to the abundance of reed canarygrass both within the cottonwood stands and immediately adjacent to the stands. All day as we maneuvered our way through tangled shrubs and tall grasses, I couldn’t help but think, “This is why I do what I do.” University students working their way through percent cover estimates, forced to physically encounter the living, breathing, tangled embrace of a riparian system. The fact that the data they collected might help establish a baseline for cottonwood restoration made the day rich in possibilities.
At the end of the day, we meandered out of the riparian zone, long shadows falling on the contours of a landscape shaped over time by the waters of the South Thompson River. The profile of valley hills peaked above a line of shrubs in the far distance. This is my home, my life, in October and I am glad. 
Traditons grow easy in the rhythmic cycle of an academic year. This year marks my 7th autumn teaching at TRU and my 7th field trip with botany students into the unique environment of Placid Lake, just north of the border of Wells Gray Park. There is an immediacy, a compelling drive, that I feel anytime I immerse myself within the activity of a botany field trip. Names ring through the wet forest on our way into the fen. This year, so many students want to make the trip that we need more help both from other faculty and family. My second year botany class remains one of my favorite classes to teach, and the embedded field trip is an important part of its charm.
Shared experiences–whether it be the bright sun and mounding Sphagnum in the fen or the pounding water coming off of Moul Falls–binds the members of Biol 2280 in a way that no classroom time ever could. I feel like all I need to do is point the crowd in the right direction and this shared spirit evolves as a natural consequence of the 36 hours we spend together, as a group, intent on exploring the natural history of the park. Each year, I drive south, away from our education and research center, with a deep sense of regret that I have to return to the larger confines of my life. At home, before I begin the marking, I take the time to finish the journal pages that I began admist this year’s cohort of botany students.
Bird nests and the bright colour of bog birch occupy me on the way out of Placid Lake.
In late August, I drive south from BC across the Columbia River basalts, up and over the Continental Divide and into the high wilderness of Yellowstone National Park for the annual gathering of the field journalers. A late summer interlude in the expansiveness of Yellowstone National Park amidst a group of women who share my passion for documenting the natural world is a luxury I don’t often experience.
For three days, I alternate between the open views of the Hayden Valley (complete with sightings of the Canyon Wolf pack and the grizzly mom with her two cubs) and the architectural complexity of the Yellowstone River’s Grand Canyon.
This time of year in Yellowstone is dominated by the extravagances of large mammals in rut. The slow excesses of bison never fail to startle me out of complacency. Here, the bison are living and large, not the relict remnants of an extinct ecosystem. I can’t imagine Yellowstone without them. Peg says, “They finish the landscape.”
I wonder what has been lost from landscapes where their hooves no longer tread.
The bones pull us up and over the mountains. Years of collection are entombed and displayed under dim lights in the cool expanse of the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology. But it is the layers of sediments exposed in the surrounding hillsides that draw my attention most. In the heat of the day while everyone else is still safely ensconced within the museum, I stand outside, reading the colours, learning how strong sunlight saps the intensity of the merlots and rusts. Three days east of the mountains teaches me about prairie light on haystacks and shadows pooling in coulees. We leave too soon for me to tire of the gentle contours, the push and pull of sediments resisting the erosion of time.
Leaves of the pitcher plant, Saracennia spp.
My time in the Nova Scotia coastal barrens has me thinking about home and floras, known and not. In the barrens, with my hands and knees wet from the soggy ground below, the sensuous curves of the charteuse, red-veined, vase-like leaves of the pitcher plant were a miracle of attraction. When we found the sturdy flower stalks perched well above the leaves, a gleeful joy bubbled within. This I saw, amidst the larger tapestry of this exposed, soggy landscape not far from Peggy’s Cove, this I saw.
In this eastern maritime landscape, some of the flora I knew. The pitcher plants and huckleberries I had learned in similar wetlands in Vermont. Others I had forgotten or never knew. What was startling to me, amidst the tour of botanists, exclamations bouncing off the stunted vegetation, was how content I was to remain a visitor.
View across the barrens
In this place, spruce and Sphagnum, Drosera and huckleberry, Gaylussacia and Myrica, belong not to me, nor I to them. At home, in the dry grasslands and forests of interior British Columbia, the flora is both a comfort and a responsibility. The rhythm of a known botany is a constant companion. When I find a plant new to me, the excitement of the find also carries with it the burden of sorting through the taxonomic keys to find its name.
But in the barrens, not knowing all the names gave me permission to play. Pen scribbling in my field journal, I could relish the miniscule flowers of the sundew (who knew they were bright yellow!), the clustering of the spruce in islands of refuge, the delicate contours of the grass pink.
In the barrens, as a botanical tourist, my task was simpler. I was, as Linnaeus once described botanists, “much given to exclamations of wonder,” reveling in the subdued shapes and forms of flora I didn’t have to know by name.
Two coastlines, two maritime landscapes. The juxtaposition of work and holiday have me flying from Halifax NS to Washington State’s San Juan Archipelago in less than a week. Based on my comfort level with the plants, one counts as home. One doesn’t. The fact that “home” doesn’t correspond with “country” makes me question the validity of arbitrary political boundaries for plants and those that track them.
Point Pleasant, Halifax, July 18, 2011
Spencer Spit, Lopez Island, Washington
Early July brings on the Saskatoon berries. Each cluster on the tall, sparse shrubs is a mixture of deep-purple black and carmine pink fruits. Down along Petersen Creek, the Saskatoon shrubs are heavy with ripe fruit and early in the morning , a woman stands alone in the fresh sunlight, pulling fruit. At the end of the walk, I break off a small branch to sketch. The next day, the summer heat descends upon this cut-valley landscape with a vengeance. Summer solstice come and gone, I linger on the rich texture of the saskatoon, cognizant of the diminishing possibilities.
Early July on the two track that stretches between Rose Hill and Juniper Ridge…
Lupines and gaillardia everywhere. Alumroot poking up amongst the grasses on the shaded cutbanks of the road. Green, green grass and the luscious contours of an aspen canopy above us on the hills. The flanks of the hills across the valley are cast into shadows. On the Sunday of our long weekend, I ride the length of this road twice–once early in the morning and then I convince the family to come back again after dinner. Even though the evening ride is brisk with an evening wind, I feel like I ride through eye candy, every turn in the road offering a new image worth a painting. 
I’ve been working on a chapter about the colours of plants and I find myself writing about delphinium purple and gallardia yellow. Right now in the grasslands north of town, both are blooming. This time of the year is ephemerally fecund with plant pigment of all sort. It is a rare treat to transfer the lines and colour of our native wildflowers into images on a page. I fear the blooming season will end all too soon.
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