I am lost in Centennial Woods on a Thursday morning in September. Despite visiting this natural area countless times, I take an unfamiliar path and end up where I am no longer able to retrace my steps. Behind and ahead of me all looks the same, a landscape of homogenized greenery. Searching for some sign of familiarity, I look to the ground. I notice Chelidonium majus (greater celandine) for its lobed leaf margins on a compound leaf. I squeeze the stem of the plant between my thumb and pointer finger to reveal its notorious yellow-orange latex. Growing nearby, I recognize Mitchella repens (partridgeberry) for its small red berries and oppositely arranged leaves. Even though I am still physically lost, I feel less so knowing these familiar plants around me. It was not until the fall of 2021, while taking Dr. Cathy Paris’s Plant Systematics course, that what was once a “green blur” became clarified; what was once unfamiliar became a place of belonging. Previous to this, I could see only as far as I had the words to describe. The expression “clarifying the green blur,” coined by Paris, who teaches in the UVM Department of Plant Biology, encapsulates the grounding experience of practicing field botany. Field botany is a discipline in which the scientific and the personal intersect beautifully, creating a sense of harmony with your surroundings. Once the green blur begins to
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clear, it is almost impossible to stop looking for patterns in plants that bring fam i l i a r i t y. Bringing this observation into your daily vision may change your perception of the world wherever you go. When first dipping your feet into the practice of field botany, simultaneously expanding and focusing your field of vision is the ultimate balancing act. Simply taking into account the sheer abundance of plants that surround us every day is the first step to igniting your curiosity. Then, you must get close to the ground and the specimen for your broad scope of plant vision to become focused. Close observation is crucial to knowing what to look out for in the field. As you begin to hone these skills, the flowers you pass by on your daily walk suddenly become part of a larger community, a family of plants with a unique natural and cultural history. Attention to fine detail is equally important when identifying a species. “Keying out” a species is a method of becoming incrementally closer to identifying a plant using a dichotomous key, first finding a plant’s group, its family, then its genus (first Latin name), and finally its species (second Latin name). Dichotomous keys ask a series of questions about the morphology of
