American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide

Description

Organized as a field guide, a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers-perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alikeAmerican Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: There are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquainted with the nature in their neighborhoods. There are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, indigenous writers. There are botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perenyi. There are prose pieces by Aldo Leopold, Lydia Davis, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. And most of all, there are poems: from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton and Louise Gluck, Natalie Diaz and Jericho Brown. The book includes exquisite watercolors by Leanne Shapton throughout and is organized by species and botanical family-think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.

Sujets

• USA
• Trees
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 08 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647006051
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 12 Mo

Extrait

Editor: Michael Sand Designer: Deb Wood Design Manager: Heesang Lee Managing Editor: Lisa Silverman Production Manager: Larry Pekarek
Library of Congress Control Number: 202293217
ISBN: 978-1-4197-6016-7 eISBN: 978-1-64700-605-1
Selection and introduction copyright
2022 by Susan Barba
Illustrations copyright
2022 by Leanne Shapton
Additional credits on this page - this page
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
When foraging and using wild plants for medicinal purposes, it is essential that readers use extreme caution and consult physicians or other medical professionals as needed. The Author and Publisher disclaim any and all liability in connection with information in this book about the foraging and use of wild plants.
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ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
FOR LILLIAN AND PHILIP
The sky is falling, she says to him. Just yesterday I saw a piece of it hit the lake on the far side of town and land in the form of a cloud. The ground seizes up in drought. Just yesterday I saw cracks in the earth. Yesterday, brushfires followed by downpours, then immediate flooding. All the more reason to talk about flowers . . . I will make a bouquet of many colors for you to eat.
-KATIE PETERSON, from Life in a Field
CONTENTS
Introduction
A Note on the Illustrations
List of Illustrated Species
List of Texts, Arranged by Species
The Field Guide
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Credits
Contributor Biographies
Aster Asteraceae spp.
INTRODUCTION
BY SUSAN BARBA
Here on a hill in Massachusetts, the fog is lifting and the sun, still in the east, is turning the yellow leaves gold. The wind is from the east, too, and the clouds are rushing ahead of the bend of light. It is late October. Still in flower are the goldenrods and asters, now waving, now steady, at the edge of the grass. The view reminds me of Edna St. Vincent Millay s poem Afternoon on a Hill, especially the first stanza:
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
I ve just rediscovered this poet, whose entire life s work I put away with childhood. I remember reading Wine from These Grapes , not knowing anything about wine, or women, or the work of being a poet, but feeling like I d stumbled on some kind of secret ceremony. I was a girl then, in Morris County, New Jersey. My favorite day of the week was Thursday, when I had piano lessons in Florham Park, not because I loved the piano especially, but because we always had time to kill between school and my lesson, time my mother used instead to take me to the Frelinghuysen Arboretum, where we d walk through the woodlands and meadows. What I liked about those afternoons was that it was just us and the flowers. After my lesson, we d circle back to the library, across the street from the arboretum, and I would check out as many books as I could carry. Flowers-music-books, all within the same circumference, which I now recognize as a gift my mother gave me. She took me by the hand and introduced me to beauty, and while I put it off later in search of knowledge, I ve come around to seeing that the two are related, that beauty is indispensable, and that books are the reproductive proof of it. This book is an attempt to reacquaint myself and others with the wild beauty we live with, to reclaim that beauty from sentimentality, consumerism, preciosity, and exclusivity.
I start with a story of my childhood because that is the origin of my feeling for flowers. I think it must be this way for many; beauty relieves us with its unexpected greeting and even integrates us. However, as a subject, beauty is often suspect. Even now writing about it causes me some embarrassment, some shame; when there is such suffering in the world, the thinking goes, how can you write about beauty? And yet beauty is linked to justice, as Elaine Scarry has argued persuasively, through an act that occurs involuntarily in its presence: At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering. 1 Scarry draws on Simone Weil, an ardent advocate for justice, to make her argument, Weil who described an encounter with beauty as a movement away from our imaginary position as the center, which allows us to discern that all points in the world are equally centers, 2 and that the periphery is only a place of insufficient attention. In this way, the experience of beauty may be a beginning, 3 and a wildflower, that most common peripheral presence, a real vector for change in the world.
My hope is that this anthology, devoted to writing about American wildflowers, will counter the plant blindness of our dominant culture by exhibiting many of the flowers in the periphery of our vision, the flowers that have been written into our literature. I hope, too, that each of these radically decentering texts will prompt a consideration of that modifying term, American. The language we use to describe people and plants often overlaps, with taxonomies that divide and place value on those divisions, words that actively discriminate. In the scientific literature and in common use, flowers are referred to as native (like sunflowers) or alien (like bluebells); they can be naturalized (like clover) or invasive (like purple loosestrife). There are migrants and exotics, escapes and refugees. The language expresses a position; it reveals a posture in regard to a species; it grants a plant its liberty or sanctions its eradication. The best writers closely observe not only the plant but our words in relation to it, and in doing so they focus our attention and clarify our intentions.
According to the dictionary, the first usage of the word wildflower, defined as the flower of a wild or uncultivated plant or the plant bearing it, occurred in 1620, the year the Mayflower landed on this continent. 4 In his poem of 1856, The Mayflowers (page 148), the Quaker poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier links the Pilgrim ship to a flower by the same name, the mayflower or trailing arbutus ( Epigaea repens ). 5 These wild-wood flowers grew abundantly around Plymouth, but they were a different flower from the one the ship had been named for, which, according to Whittier, is the English hawthorn ( Crataegus monogyna ). In the poem, the pilgrims mistake the native flower for their own mayflower, and its appearance is to them a sign of Providence. Does the origin story of a nation stem from the misidentification of a flower, from a naming that imposed a direct line where there was none? The English hawthorn is a small tree, anywhere from six to thirty feet tall, with flowers resembling apple blossoms. Epigaea repens is a creeping mat, four to six inches high, with trumpet-shaped flowers. Nostalgia is a contradictory longing for home that does not contain itself in the past but also projects itself into the future. 6
Horticulture and botany in America have deep roots in the empire the Mayflower sailed from. The establishment of the legitimacy of a people was contingent on the establishment of dominion over the flora of this new continent. This process involved not only exporting specimens and inscriptions to Europe but importing a whole history from the Old World-the Greek and Roman herbals that identified the medicinal qualities of plants, the early botanists of the sixteenth century with their herbariums and schematizations-to the New. Thus the lineage continued: with John Bartram, born in 1699, hailed as the first American-born naturalist (and titled in 1765 by King George III as the King s Botanist in North America ), whom Carl Linnaeus 7 called the greatest natural botanist in the world and whose colonial plant collection came from the Shenandoah Valley and Blue Ridge Mountains; with his son, William Bartram (born 1739), whose travels in the South inspired the English Romantic poets, and who chronicled his discoveries of plants and peoples in his Travels in the North and South ; with the publication of the first American flora, Flora Virginica (1762), written in Latin and published in Holland; with the establishment of the earliest institutions-the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1829, the Public Garden in Boston in 1837, and the Arnold Arboretum, America s first public collection of plants, in 1872. 8 Only now, in the twenty-first century, is the decolonization of botany beginning. Native botanical knowledge, which predated this imposed heritage, and continued to exist alongside it to the extent that teachings were not irrevocably lost in the genocide of the Native peoples, is at last being properly recognized by botanists and the wider public for its primacy, complexity, and necessity.
This short history of our knowledge of the native plants and wild-flowers is a story of how the flowers, unwittingly, became American. Their growth preceded these events and proceeded apace. Henry David Thoreau, the most perspicacious of amateur botanists, wrote, We find ourselves in a world that is already planted, but is also still being planted as at first. 9 Thoreau sought to create a Kalendar that would record the first flowerings of the hundreds of species he identified annually in Concord and its environs. He recognized the enduring power of their perennial presence. Even the most ephemeral wildflowers can assume outsize significance, for they are symbols of