Completing botany pages for my Dent County Flora is challenging. You might ask: how hard could it be to take a picture of a flower and write a sentence about it?
That would be easy. That is not what I am doing.
One case in point would be the Wild Pink or Wherry’s Pink, Silene caroliniana. This is a lovely little spring ephemeral flower in vivid pink.
The first step is to get pictures of the flower and plant. That assumes I’ve found the plant. I take a series of pictures including the plant, flower, side of the flower, the leaf, the stem and the fruit or seed pod.
Wherry’s Pink grows along one of my hills. I admire it every spring and take pictures of it every spring.
I sat down and began completing botany pages. There were the plant, flower, side of flower, leaf, stem pictures. And no seed pod.
A spring ephemeral plant grows quickly, blooms, sets seed and disappears. I’ve been trying to get that seed pod picture for two years now.
Last year I put up a marking flag by a group of plants. When I went back, other plants had grown over the remains of the Pinks. I couldn’t find them.
This year I found some other plants in a more open area. Lots of plants don’t like growing in the gravelly areas of the hill.
I went back and began to search. It is amazing how a plant can seem to disappear overnight. But I did find a couple with seed pods on them.
Now I can continue completing botany pages for Wherry’s Pinks. And for the wild peach trees as I went out to take pictures of the leaves. How I forgot to take a leaf picture, I don’t know, but I found I did last winter. Peaches are deciduous.
Once I have the pictures, choosing the ones to use, cropping, resizing and setting up the page can take an hour or more.
Maybe I should go back to writing my novel. That takes less time for each page.
I’ve walked the same hills for almost thirty years now. You would think this would get boring, but it doesn’t. Every week is different from the week before. There are always new things to see.
“My Ozark Home” was done on the twenty-fifth anniversay of my time here. It contains many of the things I saw over that time.
