Oceans of Color

by Becca Rooney

I am walking down an October street. I am on my way to class, or maybe to grab some dinner, or maybe I am just on a walk. I am surrounded by an ocean of color. The greens come from productivity. The yellows come from happiness. The reds and oranges come from passion. Together these colors come from change. It is a symphony perfectly composed by soil, rain, sun, and competition. You can learn to read the music by studying the colors, the complexities, and the synergies. Once you have gained this literacy, you don’t see plants and trees. You hear the harmony of productivity, happiness, and passion.

But I look deeper at each individual note. Each one can stand alone to be examined and tested by the extremes of its environment. Each note has its own unique function and characteristics. It is important to look at these notes on this small scale to appreciate their worth. The combination– propagation of these notes are what sustains life. I look around to see the emotions of Mother Nature, and I hear the music she plays.

While being in a class that hums to her tune, I have caught the music bug. I have to apologize in advance to my friends who are subject to my spontaneous naming of plants and spewing fun facts about each one in hopes they will too catch the contagion. Hearing this music enhances my experience every time I step outside. But in knowing how each note fits together to create this symbiosis, I can better understand my humble place in the audience.

Becca Rooney is a Biology major at Bucknell University and a participant in Chris Martine's Field Botany class. The students took some time to write up their Plant Love Stories as a reflection of the class. We will be sharing their stories in the coming weeks.

Photo credit: Fall Foliage by Digby Dalton from wikimedia commons.

The Four Musketeers

by Kendyll Hazzard

Paper birch bark

Recently I found myself along the side of a road, learning about ​Betula papyrifera​, the paper birch, as a part of my Field Botany course. I realized I had seen this tree many times before and had spent many days considering the thin, flaky bark of this tree as a part of my juvenile scientific curiosities. Coming face to face with this childhood friend during class quickly set my mind wandering towards simpler times living in rural Wisconsin.

Picture this: a small A-frame cottage on the Rock river with two large birch trees scattering yellow leaves over the front lawn. A quad of small children is playing “tag, you’re it” and running in circles around the trees, which have lost most of their papery bark. Some of this loss was through natural wear and tear, but mostly it was at the hands of curious seven year olds who wanted to know if they could “unwind” these mysterious birch trees. The youngsters had been told not to hurt the poor tree, but as kids will always be kids, this warning was unheeded. They would take turns peeling off strips of chalky white bark, competing to see who could pull off the longest, thinnest strip without it breaking or tearing, and left the scraps in messy piles around the base of the trees for an exasperated grandfather to clean up later.

Fast forward a decade or so, and those two birch trees are still standing tall, despite five years and four children’s worth of torment. Everything else had been cleared out and thrown away: the rose bush I once tumbled backwards into during a misguided attempt to learn to ride a bike (which I still don’t know how to do), the pine trees that once stood like guards, blocking my siblings and I from trespassing onto the neighbor’s front yard, the two bushes that outlined the path from the driveway to the front door, and the small cherry and plum trees that my grandmother loved so much.

The four musketeers - Kendyll, Ryen, Layne, and Halsey, with their dad and great-grandmother

I went back home to visit recently, and my jaw almost dropped when I realized just how much had changed in the years I had been absent. But my siblings and I had changed as well. Over time our rowdy gang - the four musketeers - grew up.

We moved away, branched out, and put down roots in new and exciting places. Still, no matter how far from home I am, and how much I miss those years of playing in the light shade of the birch trees, it’s comforting to know that those poor trees that the four of us hassled and harassed against our grandpa’s wishes were still surviving, still thriving. And maybe that’s a sign that those four musketeers will survive and thrive as well.

Kendyll Hazzard is a Biology major at Bucknell University and a participant in the Chris Martine's Field Botany class. The students took some time to write up their Plant Love Stories as a reflection of the class. We will be sharing some of their stories in the coming weeks.

Photo credit: Paper birch by Sue Sweeney from wikimedia commons.

Two Types of Plants

by Matt Drescher

Nyssa sylvatica

There are two types of plants. There’s plants, and then there’s Plants.

“plants” (small p) are like trees (small t). They’re what you see when you’re driving down the highway and you’re looking out the window. They’re the soft-toned flowers sitting in a vase or the blurred out background in a picture of a dog. “plants” are what you take for granted as always being there, because, what are they going to do, move?

Plants, on the other hand, are what you notice when you’re not moving either. They’re in the woods and in gardens. They have personalities–like the bold Sycamore and the mysterious Sphagnum. You develop relationships with Plants because you’ve spent hours at a blackboard coming up with the fact that Nyssa sounds like “Mhysa”, which is a name given to a TV character that controls fire-breathing dragons, and the fact that Sylvatica sounds like ‘Sylvan’, which is the name of the street corner you grew up on. You put those together to remember that Nyssa sylvatica has fiery-red leaves and right-angled branch corners.

These Plants don’t leave your life after you’ve been quizzed on them, either. You remember and take notice of them, and the next time you’re walking across campus, you stop to notice the leaf pattern on a tree you’ve only ever seen as a plant. You start to see plants in the bread you eat, the wood you sit on, and even in the plastic in your hand. You literally start to see the Forest through the trees.

Matt Drescher is a Biology major at Bucknell University and a participant in Chris Martine's Field Botany class. The students took some time to write up their Plant Love Stories as a reflection of their participation in the class. We will be sharing some of their stories in the coming weeks.

Photo credit: Nyssa sylvatica by Katja Schulz from wikimedia commons.