Where the wild things grow
Spring comes to life for me when the wildflowers emerge to bloom. There are so many good ones. Take the lady’s slipper. I spotted my first one last year — a deeply pink orchid poking through the carpet of dead leaves along a trail. The flower supposedly resembles a slip-on house shoe — in my mind, worn by a vixen in a matching fur-trimmed satin robe. But the blossom I saw actually reminded me more of a miniature zeppelin, ready for a flight to pixie land. Another is the jack-in-the-pulpit — where “jack” is an archaic synonym for “preacher.”
This flower’s thick central spike could be a priest — and the hooded petal surrounding the minister could be his robe. These colorful facts I know thanks to a tattered Audubon Society field guide a near-stranger gave me by chance.
Nearly a decade ago, I took on a horsesitting gig in rural Pennsylvania. The twohundred-acre property was encircled by mountains, lined by creeks, and nestled inside eight thousand acres of state forest, full of majestic hemlocks, maples, and oaks. Never had I been so engulfed by nature.
One winter day, I’d gone out to say good morning to the resident stallion when something strangely beautiful caught my eye — an uneven line of rustbrown stalks standing at attention in front of the old chicken coop. It took a beat before I understood that these tall strands, frozen into undulating shapes, had once been alive. They were beaded with rough-hewn seed pods that made them look industrial, like ancient pieces of barbed wire protruding from the earth. Surely some minor god had cast a spell on them, turning them into hags doomed to guard that decaying coop — until I, playing hero, returned them to their true form. To lift the spell, maybe I only had to say their name.
But what was their name? I was determined to find out. Not that I believe in magic. But when I hear a mesmerizing song in a bar, I want to know what it’s called. Same with the weeds: If I could name them, I would not forget them.
I asked everyone — the horse’s owner, the electrician, the plumber — if they knew what my wild things were. I only got shrugs until I asked a neighbor who liked to hike. He answered by excavating a book from the junk-filled trunk of his beat-up old car: “The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers.” It was as beat-up as his car, its pages stuck together with bits of melted chocolate.
“Look in there for your weed,” he said. I barely knew what a field guide was, let alone how to use one. But the Audubon was a good primer for a beginner like me. Its 658 photos were divided into sections by color, subdivided according to flower shape, with categories that speed your search. I got the hang of it quickly. Soon enough, however, I found myself up against another obstacle: Winter is not flowering season. My weed had no petals left, which meant I couldn’t search by color or shape. I would have to wait until the warm weather to learn what it was.
As spring came, I checked the chicken coop constantly, eager for my hardened gray-brown weeds to come to life. They didn’t. But I carried the field guide with me everywhere, leafing through its pages to find the names of other plants, such as the one covered with small green seeds — like a belly dancer dripping with sequins. That one had a very ordinary name: curly dock. Then there was the shepherd’s purse, which could have been a miniature hanging mobile. Floating up its stem were tiny heart-shaped seeds — though upon closer inspection, they were actually held in place by tiny hair-like stalks, which I learned are called pedicels. And there was American bugleweed — tall and thick-stemmed, with minuscule trumpet-shaped flowers, all purplishwhite — growing in abundance.
Without close inspection of the patch every day, I would have noticed nothing but a green cluster of undifferentiated weeds. The details of the various plants were miraculous to me — akin to discovering tiny mugs hanging over a dollhouse kitchen counter.
As autumn approached, my tall weeds remained dead and brown and nameless. The other plants began to go to seed, and then something remarkable happened: As the American bugleweed died off, its petals and leaves fell away to reveal rough beads remarkably like those of my recalcitrant weed. Within days, the bugleweed plants transformed into the row of witchy swaying stalks I was so familiar with. I finally recognized it as my weed. It had been right in front of me all along, growing anew.
In “Field Guide,” a book of poems by Robert Hass, the narrator describes himself as someone who has “believed so long in the magic of names.” Naming the plants around me helps me to see them more fully — all the richness of their detail and all the forms they assume. I also now understand what Henry David Thoreau meant when he called a weed “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” The humbly named American bugleweed is, in fact, also called a wildflower.