American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide
Edited with Introduction by Susan Barba
Illustrated by Leanne Shapton
ABRAMS | 2020 | 340 pages
I have spent a year with American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide on my desk, picking it up every so often to read a poem or short essay. Some days I just gaze at the colorful watercolor illustrations, running my hand over the glossy pages. As a research scientist who transitioned into writing and teaching poetry, I find this anthology both validating and thought-provoking. It feeds both sides of my plant-loving brain and as I savored this book in small bits and pieces, I was able to reflect on the importance of presence, art, and the wide-ranging, yet still misunderstood, benefits of interdisciplinary inquiry and exploration.
In her introduction, editor Susan Barba writes, “Wildflowers have never been more endangered and in need of our renewed attention.” The combination of literary and visual art in this anthology spotlights the beauty and resiliency of wildflowers, but also illuminates a vital and intrinsic bond between art and science. The literary content is organized by the plant families that appear in the creative work and the list of images includes both the common and Latin name, mimicking an actual field guide.
As I read through this anthology, I was reminded of hiking with botanist friends who were always toting their beloved (and hefty!) Flora of the Pacific Northwest or Jepson Manuals. It was important for them to know the scientific names, so they would stop multiple times to use their field guides to identify a plant. Similarly, throughout this anthology, there are numerous examples of writers who have taken the slow path—stepping outside of themselves to look and relate to wildflowers and the wide range of emotions they can invoke. In her poem “Snowdrops,” Sandra Lim writes, “This year’s snowdrops: is it that they are spare, and have a slightly / fraught lucidity, or are they proof that pain, too, can be ornate?” Jericho Brown’s poem “The Tradition,” from his collection of the same name, begins “Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium” and concludes “John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown,” challenging the reader to hold beauty and devastating loss and injustice simultaneously.
As a young biology student, I found it difficult to key out a plant to species. You take an unknown specimen from the wild, its green body slowly wilting, as you work through the complex classification system delineating phyla, families, genera, and so on based on a wide range of physical characteristics (leaf shape, flower arrangement, petal number, etc.), each with its own specialized terminology. Over time, I grew to see that keying out plants is a creative process, relying on intuitive guesses, visual cues, and also a deep meditative focus needed to determine the plant’s western scientific name. The more you focus on the plant, the more you become connected to it. I believe this holds true whether you are an artist or a scientist, or both.
Wildflowers in this collection play a variety of roles, from muse to metaphor, and I wasn’t surprised to find prominent environmental writers including Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Camille T. Dungy. However, I also appreciated re-reading some of my favorite poets and essayists through the lens of the flora that spoke to them. In “Signatures,” Richard Wilbur writes about false Solomon’s seal, “Their heads inclining / Toward the dark earth, one blessing / And one divining.” In “Evening Primrose,” Rita Dove writes:
They’ll wait until the world’s
tucked in and the sky’s
one ceaseless shimmer—then
lift their saturated eyelids
and blaze, blaze,
all night long
for no one.
Although these poems differ greatly in form and content, they offer information about the plant’s behavior that is infused with a deeper significance, making me care about both the plant and the narrator.
An ongoing question I ask in my work as an environmental writer is how we build significant bridges of mutual respect and influence between art and science, especially in the face of mass extinction and climate change. In her potent essay “Asters and Goldenrod,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “It is this dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge, a new way of being in the world. After all, there aren’t two worlds, there is just this one good green earth.” Going beyond using poetry for science communication or mining the science for creative spark, what new ways of knowing might blossom from the hard work of reaching across disciplines and experimenting with multiple modalities for understanding nature and our role as humans in it? It is important to note that many of our plant names, both common and Latin, stem from settlement and colonization. Writers can be instrumental in recognizing and reconnecting with traditional plant names, uses, and stories, such as in the essays contributed by Enrique Salmón and Mary Kawena Pukui (with Laura S.C. Green).
The choice to include the provocative and amorphous watercolor illustrations by Leanne Shapton distinguishes this anthology from other themed anthologies and is also a pointed departure from an actual field guide. The images, noted by their sensuous color and blurred edges, present the essence of each plant and remind me of the semester in college that I helped organize our college’s herbarium. It was tedious work, sorting and organizing the large sheets of paper that had dried plants glued to them. A “good” specimen demonstrated the key shapes and features of the plant. Although Shapton’s illustrations forego scientific accuracy for emotional impact, they still function as an accompanying herbarium to the literary content. Within this book they act like colorful ghosts—haunting the page and possibly warning the reader of an impending extinction. June Jordan’s poem, “Letter to the Local Police,” which describes “unidentified roses” that are “abiding in perpetual near riot / of wild behavior,” accompanies Shapton’s stunning image of a wild rose—orange-red with bright green leaves and the occasional morass of colors bleeding together—adding to the impact of this darkly humorous and effective poem.
The ability to be present in the natural world is a skill shared by poets and scientists. The products of this attention—poems, paintings, classification systems, plant names, population data—can lead us, if we let them, to a heightened sense of responsibility for our surrounding ecosystems as well as our own complicated internal landscape.
Read “Moon,” an excerpt of A Little Bit of Land, by Jessica Gigot, also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by 3887894, courtesy Pixabay.