Trees and Wildflowers 101

Lesson 1

Why learning names changes how you see

Mrs. Dana opens her book with a promise. "The pleasure of a walk in the woods and fields is enhanced a hundredfold by some little knowledge of the flowers which we meet at every turn." She meant it literally. Their names, she says, are a key to their whole histories, and give us a sense of companionship with our surroundings. An unnamed flower is scenery. A named one is an acquaintance, with a family, a season, a favorite soil, and a story, and you begin to notice it everywhere, the way you notice a friend face in a crowd.

Julia Ellen Rogers says the same thing about trees. "The name is the thing we wish first to know when we meet a stranger." We ask it of people without thinking, and a tree is no different: once you can say oak, or beech, or shagbark hickory, the tree steps out of the green blur and becomes somebody. Rogers adds that the learning itself is a pleasure rather than a chore, a good game to be played outdoors, and both of our authors built their books so that a beginner wins that game quickly, with the eyes first and the memory second.

One honest note belongs at the start. Plant names are not carved in stone. Every flower in Dana book carries a common name and a two part Latin name, meant to be the same in all the world, but botanists keep studying, and some of the Latin names and family groupings printed in 1893 and 1909 have been changed since. The plants, of course, have not changed at all. So learn names gladly from these old friends, and check the Latin against any modern field guide when precision matters. The seeing, which is the real subject of this course, never goes out of date.

Lesson 2

Parts of a flower

Pick up one common, complete flower, a buttercup or a wild rose will do, and you hold the whole vocabulary of this lesson. Beneath the blossom sits a ring of small green leaves, the sepals, together called the calyx, which wrapped and protected the bud. Inside them opens the showy ring, the petals, together the corolla, whose color and scent advertise the flower to passing insects. Dana asks only that you learn these parts by looking at the living flower, with a magnifying glass if you have one, and her book promises the terms will stop being forbidding within a page or two.

The working parts stand in the center. Around the middle rise the stamens, slender stalks topped with little knobs, the anthers, which manufacture pollen, the flower golden dust. In the very center stands the pistil, with a sticky tip, the stigma, made to catch pollen, a neck, the style, and a swollen base, the ovary, inside which sit the ovules, the future seeds. A flower with both stamens and pistil, plus its sepals and petals in place, is what botanists call complete, and Dana drawing of one is the front door to her whole system.

Why the machinery? Because a flower is a seed factory, and it usually needs a partner. Dana explains that nature seems to prefer that a pistil receive pollen from a different flower rather than its own, so blossoms hire couriers. Bees blunder in for nectar, come out dusted with pollen, and deliver it to the next flower they visit, which is why so many flowers are colored, scented, and shaped like landing fields. Once the pollen lands and the ovules are fertilized, the ovary swells into fruit and the seeds ripen inside it. Every apple, acorn, and dandelion clock begins exactly here.

Lesson 3

Wildflowers by color and season

Here is Dana great, simple invention. Other guides of her day demanded that beginners analyze flowers with technical keys full of Latin and counts of parts. She arranged hers the way a walker actually meets a flower: by color first, then by season. Her descriptions run in sections, white, yellow, pink, red, blue and purple, and a miscellaneous shelf, and inside each color the spring flowers come first, then summer, then autumn. Someone asks you the name of some large pink flower seen by the wayside, and you turn straight to pink, in the right part of the year, and there are only a few candidates.

The system works because color is what the eye honestly keeps. Size fades in memory and leaf shapes blur, but the color of a blossom fixes itself, as Dana says, as the more definitely appreciated characteristic of the two. Work it on real flowers. In spring, the white bloodroot opens in rich woods before the trees leaf out, and spring beauty spreads its pink veined white stars over whole banks. Summer brings the tall red cardinal flower along streams. Autumn closes with blue and purple asters and the closed gentian, whose petals never open at all. If your flower is not in the color you first try, check the neighbor: pinks, blues, and purples shade into each other, and even careful observers disagree.

Now a safety line, and this course means it plainly: never eat a wild plant based on an old book say-so. Books of Dana era mention household and medicinal uses of plants freely, and some of the plants in her pages, the mayapple, bloodroot, and others, are poisonous in part or in whole. A name learned from any book, old or new, is never a dinner invitation. Enjoy wildflowers with your eyes, your notebook, and your camera. Let the only thing you taste on a flower walk be the air, and leave every root and berry where it grows.

Lesson 4

Leaves, bark, and branching

Flowers are absent half the year, so Rogers teaches the signs that never leave. "The winter signs to notice are the bark, the buds, and the leaf scars, the shape of the tree, and the way it branches." Learning trees, she promises, "is not dreary and hard, but a good game to be played out-of-doors," and winter is its finest season, because the framework of trunk and branch stands bare and readable. A tree shape is a signature at a hundred yards: the elm rises like a fountain or vase, the oak spreads a broad, rugged crown, the Lombardy poplar stands in a green exclamation point.

Bark is a signature at arm length. Everybody knows the white birch by its silky, peeling white bark, and the sycamore sheds its bark in thin, irregular patches, leaving the trunk and limbs streaked dirty white, as if daubed with whitewash. The shagbark hickory goes the other way: its bark splits into long, loose strips that cling at the middle and curl away at both ends, so the trunk looks shaggy from a distance. The beech keeps the opposite elegance, smooth, pale grey bark that seems too fine for a forest tree, and invites every passerby with a pocketknife, which is a shame.

Leaves finish the identification in summer, and Dana terms are enough. A simple leaf is one undivided blade; a compound leaf is divided into leaflets along a stalk, like the hickory, whose leaf is five or seven leaflets on one wiry stem and can run over a foot long. Notice how the leaves attach: opposite each other in pairs, as on the maples, or alternating up the twig, as on the oaks. Then look down. Under each bud sits last year leaf scar, and the fallen leaves on the ground beneath will match it, and often the tree fruit lies among them, handing you the name on a plate.

Lesson 5

Common trees and how to tell them apart

Start with the family Rogers calls the surest of all. If a tree bears acorns, it is an oak, every acorn sitting in its own little cup, and there are fifty kinds in American forests alone. The oaks then split into two great companies. The white oak group, white oak, bur oak, post oak, and chestnut oak among them, have leaves with rounded lobes and acorns that ripen in a single season and taste comparatively sweet. The black oak group, black, red, scarlet, and pin oaks, have leaves ending in bristle tipped points, and acorns that take two years to ripen and are bitter with tannin. One leaf and one autumn tells you which company you are in.

The maples announce themselves twice a year. In spring and summer, look for leaves set opposite each other on the twig and the familiar hand shaped leaf, then look for their fruit: pairs of winged seeds, samaras, joined like a tiny wishbone, which spin down like helicopters. The sugar maple gives sweet sap in earliest spring and the most brilliant orange red autumn of any eastern tree. Against the maples set the pines, known by needles in bundles. Count the needles in one bundle and you have done real botany: the white pine, Rogers favorite, carries five soft needles in every bundle, one for each letter of its name, if you spell it W, H, I, T, E.

Fill in the neighborhood with a few more certainties. The beech keeps smooth grey bark and long, slender, cigar shaped buds, and drops small three sided nuts in prickly burrs. The shagbark hickory drops rich nuts whose green husks split neatly into four parts, unlike the walnut, whose spongy husk never parts and must rot or be torn away. The willows keep company with water, wear long narrow leaves, and flower in soft catkins, the pussy willows of earliest spring. Take any unknown tree and demand two agreeing signs, leaf and bark, or fruit and shape, before you name it. That one habit will keep you honest and make your names stick.

Lesson 6

Trees through the four seasons

Rogers arranged her whole book by the calendar, autumn studies, winter studies, spring studies, summer studies, because a tree is four different acquaintances in one year. Begin in autumn, the showiest season. The nut trees ripen their stores, hickories, walnuts, chestnuts, beechnuts, and acorns, and squirrels and children race for the harvest. Winged seeds sail from maples and ashes, other seeds ride parachutes of down, and then the leaves turn: Rogers devotes a whole study to the changing color of the autumn woods, the maples flaming, the oaks deepening to russet and wine, the hickories going clear gold.

Winter strips the tree to its architecture, and Rogers insists it is not a dead season but a readable one. This is the time for bark and shape and buds, for the evergreens that carry the green through the snow, pines, spruces, firs, and cedars, each with its own cones and needle arrangements, and for surprises like the larch and the bald cypress, conifers that break the rule and drop their needles entirely. A green layer just under the bark of a broken twig tells you the tree is alive and waiting. Winter buds, Rogers shows, are not vague promises: each holds next spring shoot folded in miniature, leaf or flower, ready packed.

Spring wakes the tree from the top of the twig down. Buds swell, scales fall, and many trees flower before they leaf: the red maple blooms crimson while the woods are still bare, the elms hang their small flowers, and the willows open their catkins. Rogers calls this section the awakening of the trees, and follows it with why trees need leaves at all, the green factories that feed the whole enormous body from sunlight and air. Then summer crowns the year: deep shade, the largest flowers of any trees on the tulip tree and the magnolias, basswood bloom humming with bees, early berries reddening, and the long, slow thickening of fruit toward autumn, when your walk around the calendar begins again.

Lesson 7

Pressing flowers and leaves

Pressing is the oldest way to keep a flower, and it still works beautifully. Pick, where picking is right, one good specimen with its stem and a leaf or two, and press it the same day, while it is fresh. Lay it flat between sheets of plain absorbent paper, arranging petals and leaves so they show their shape, then weight the paper inside a heavy book or under a stack of books. Change the paper every few days at first, because a damp specimen molds, and in two to four weeks your flower will be dry, flat, and ready to mount on a stiff sheet with a label.

The label is what separates a keepsake from a specimen, and Dana recommended the habit behind it to every beginner: a notebook, with jottings of the date, the color, and the surroundings of every flower you identify. Write the same on your pressed sheet: the plant name, common and Latin, where you found it, the date, and the habitat, woods, meadow, roadside, swamp. Dana own book grew out of work in a college herbarium, a library of just such pressed and labeled sheets, and botanists still consult herbarium sheets centuries old because the labels turned dead plants into permanent records.

Press with a conscience, and here the old books need a modern footnote. Some wildflowers that Dana and Rogers treated as common are now scarce in places, worn down by picking, collecting, and lost habitat, and many are protected by law in parks and preserves. The rule for our century is simple: photograph first. Press only plants that are abundant where you stand, never take the only one, never dig roots, and never pick anything protected or rare, full stop. A photograph and a notebook entry keep a scarce flower just as well as a press does, and they leave it standing for the next walker, and for next year.

Lesson 8

Make a field guide to your neighborhood

Your final project gathers the whole course into one small book of your own: a field guide to your neighborhood. Choose the ground first, a walk you actually take, around your streets, through a park, along a stream, and claim it as your territory. Then inventory it the Dana and Rogers way. Aim at first for ten trees you can name in every season and ten wildflowers you can name by color and season. That is a modest list, and most beginners are astonished to find their ordinary route holds twice that, once their eyes are open.

Give each plant a page. Put its name at the top, common and Latin side by side, then your own description in your own words: where exactly it stands, when it flowers or fruits, the bark, the leaf, the one sign you trust most. Add a sketch or a pasted photograph, add your pressed leaf if the plant is common, and date every observation. Leave blank space on every page, because a field guide is never finished. You will be back in another season, and the tree you described by its summer leaf will need its winter paragraph, and the flower page will need its fruit.

Two last counsels from your teachers, updated honestly. First, verify: some plant names and family placements have changed since 1893 and 1909, so once a year, check your guide Latin names against a current field guide or a botanical garden list, and pencil in the corrections. Your book gets more accurate as it ages, which is more than most books can say. Second, share it. Rogers wrote for children because a name learned young is kept for life, so walk your route with a child, a friend, or a neighbor, and lend them your eyes. A neighborhood full of named trees is a neighborhood that gets defended, planted, and loved.

Sources

The Books Behind This Course

This course is taught from two beloved books of the nature study movement. Both are free for anyone to read in full at Project Gutenberg.

• How to Know the Wild Flowers, by Mrs. William Starr Dana (1893), Project Gutenberg
• Trees Every Child Should Know, by Julia Ellen Rogers (1909), Project Gutenberg

Graduation

You finished Trees and Wildflowers 101

You started with strangers and you finish among friends: flowers you can greet by color and season, trees you can name by bark and leaf in the middle of winter. You have pressed your first specimens and begun a field guide to your own streets and paths. Keep walking, keep naming, and keep the notebook going. Congratulations, neighbor to the trees.

Back to Starvard University