the plant collection

I have been working toward documenting, collecting, and creating a personal encyclopedia of local wild plants, an ongoing project for the past several months. this week, I submitted the first installment of my plant collection to my instructors. fifty-odd plants, categorized into herbs, ferns, and introduced species were carefully (and sometimes haphazardly) collected and pressed in old textbooks, between sheets of the globe and mail, corrugated cardboard, and splintering wood, mounted on cardstock, and meticulously labeled. they were completed with scratches of detailed information on location elevations, nutrient indicator values. I poured over stories of cultural uses, wildlife relationships, associated species, and the poetry in the rhythms of the latin names: coptis asplenifolia, epilobium angustifolim, cornus canadensis, lupinus nootkatensis, athyrium filix-femina (fern-leaved goldthread, fireweed, dwarf dogwood, nootka lupine, lady fern).

the process continues, the library grows:

Nuphar polysepalum, Cypress Mountain

Xerophyllum tenax, Waterton Lakes National Park

collecting in the coulees, Lethbridge

Fauria crista-galli, Cypress Mountain

Hollyburn Peak

I am creating a library of live plants; divided and subdivided into shrubs, herbs, trees, and mosses, and then into the more detailed Liliaceae, Rosaceae, Asteraceae, Ericaceae, Cyperaceae, among many others. I go on collector walks in the forest; scissors and a specimen box keep the hiking slow and concentrated, interrupted excitement over a new discovery, a puzzling species, or a particularly bright-flowering lily or fireweed.
Yesterday we walked up Cypress mountain to Hollyburn peak. Everything had been soaked by our first autumn rainfall the day before and we were wading in dark black mud pouring down the mountain and forming in root-framed pools. Little mushrooms, browns or whites, were emerging through the thick and soaked moss. We could see our breath in the morning shadows and squinted into the sun eclipsed by the hemlock, cedar, alder. Small alpine wild blueberry shrubs kept us walking stooped and slow, like black bears, purple stains on our lips and fingertips. These are some of the plants we gathered; some of the summits we saw:

western hemlock; Tsuga heterophylla

deer fern; Blechnum spicant

clubmoss; Lycopodium ssp.

oval-leafed blueberry; Vaccinium ovalifolium

yellow pond-lily or spatterdock; Nuphar polysepalum

Hollyburn peak