By Maya Kagan

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 clear, it is almost impossible to stop looking for patterns in plants that bring familiarity. 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

the plant, ranging from the makeup of its inflorescence (flower arrangement) to its leaf shape. Keying out a species can be a challenging and daunting task, especially with the barrier of botanical jargon hindering each step. So, while familiarizing yourself with this language is certainly helpful for accurate plant identification, there are simpler ways you might begin your “green awakening.”

Family-wide characteristics are usually easy to remember and spot, making them a great place to start narrowing the range of your focus. These characteristics apply to a wide enough variety of plants to make them easy to distinguish, yet a small enough group to feel the scope of your vision narrow. What once was a crowded grouping of evergreen ferns, becomes distinguishable as members of the Polypodiaceae family through their once divided leaves (pinnation) and rounded sori (grouping of spora ngium) on their underside. A group of generic flowers arranged in a capitulum head (like daisies or sunflowers) can be attributed to the Asteraceae (Composite) Family. And a plant with many smaller yellow flowers and thin seed pods can be placed in the Brassicaceae (Mustard) Family. Collecting just a handful of these family-wide characteristics into your frame of reference will begin to alter your perception of the plants around you and bring you closer to their world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, indigenous ecologist, professor, and author of the books Gathering Moss and Braiding Sweetgrass, expresses the personal connection that comes with identifying plants. In her first book discussing the cultural and natural history of moss, she personifies mosses as beings with unique backgrounds and stories to share. One of these, Bryum argenteum, is a highly adaptable species of moss that has become increasingly suited to city habitats. Laying underneath our feet every day, their spores are the most commonly dispersed via human footsteps. Kimmerer describes the intricacies of Bryum mor phology, including their shiny hairs that reflect sunlight and protect the plant from drying out. This species of moss, as well as similar species, has found a home in the human -made environments we often perceive as unnatural. Mosses, despite the crucial role that humans play in their lives, often go unnoticed to the untrained eye. Kimmerer’s account of moss is a tale about getting closer to plants right below our feet, allowing us to understand their significance to us, and ours to them.

Bringing together personal experience and knowledge of family characteristics is the recipe for successful field botany. Imagine you are sitting by the edge of a field of tall grass. A new type of flower catches your eye. Relatively short in height, its purple flowers congregate around

one centralized cone or “spike.” This much you know, without any understanding of what this might mean for the categorization of the flower. Twisting the stem in between your pointer finger and thumb, you feel four ridges in a square-like shape. With the knowledge that a square stem is a defining characteristic of the Lamiaceae (mint) family, you begin to narrow your gaze. With a small hand lens, you focus on the flowers, noticing that each is bilaterally symmetrical, or symmetrical across one point of symmetry. This type of symmetry, as opposed to flowers that are radially symmetrical, is yet another indicator that this flower must belong in the mint family.

These quick observations help to narrow your scope from 437 flowering plant families in existence to just one. Familiarizing yourself with family-wide plant characteristics is something anyone can do with a little time and effort. Resources such as Botany in a Day and Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide are digestible resources to get your knowledge of plant families flowering.

The practice of field botany is directly informed by the field of plant systematics, which encompasses taxonomy, phylogeny, and most importantly, the evolutionary history of plants. Plant systematics utilizes morphological, molecular, and chromosomal data, making it a highly standardized scientific field. Despite this scientific objectivity, there is an inherent emotional response evoked from partaking in such a practice. There is something grounding about being able to put your finger on the name of a plant. In times when almost everything feels out of your control, having the ability to control how you perceive your surroundings is a perfect remedy.

That is the beauty of field botany. It is always waiting for you, inviting you to discover which plants resonate with you most. There will always be more plants to meet, more stories to learn, and more landscapes to be clarified. You can learn a lot about a place you have never been to before by noticing the types of plants growing there. Then again, you can learn a lot about plants by observing where they like to grow. Practicing field botany has taught me that engaging in the practice of paying close attention is sure to change your perception of your surroundings. It is a lesson I hold onto tightly both in and out of the field, and one that is there for anybody who wishes to discover its beauty. To clarify the green blur is to organically form connections between plants, places, and self in your everyday life. It means having a community you know by name almost anywhere you go that continues to grow as you do. H

Art by Maya Kagan