Wildflowers

Hydrophyllum virginianum
Originally uploaded by FreeManWalking

WILDFLOWERS April 2009

I spent the morning reading a book about how to find one’s true path in the world. The book used the analogy of the North Star throughout. There were words like essential self and social self and lots of helpful suggestions about getting the two types of selves connected. After a few chapters I realized I already knew what I wanted to do. Just ask me. I’ll casually wave my hand through the air painting a broad stroke and vaguely say, I want to do something with plants. I see that in my future.
If one wants to make a lot of money doing something with plants then I suggest the plants be Otto Luyken laurels, Nellie Stevens holly, or Green Giant arborvitae. But that afternoon of April 21, 2009 I walked out and found a wealth of a different sort in the richness of the wildflowers at Nashville’s Radnor Lake.
Starting from the east side of the park I took the Gainer Ridge Trail and found an abundance of Larkspur growing on the lower portions of a steep slope. As the trail winded its way through the little hollow and up onto the ridge the flowers thinned out until up on the ridge all I found was some spring beauty interspersed among the shagbark hickories, dogwoods, and chinquapin oak. Coming back down off the ridge into a secluded hollow the forest floor came alive with flowers: Jack-in-the-pulpit, may-apple, anemone, Virginia waterleaf, yellow violet, and a morel mushroom thrown in for good measure.
The walk reminded me of long ago when I was at the end of my first round of college. In May 1995 I graduated with a chemistry degree and, like so many new college graduates, essentially no life skills whatsoever. I got a job at a bookstore and worked part time at a grocery store named Super-Rama. Even though it was small that little store did more food stamp business than any other store in the county. I saw where I was headed: I’d be that wiry little guy with a slicked back duck tail of hair that walked in everyday wearing a stained white t-shirt. I’d buy a quart of Schlitz Malt Liquor and find a porch to sot on for the rest of the day.
This oblivion lasted only a couple of months until my parents thankfully kicked me out of the house. I moved back to the college town I’d known for the past four years, got a loan and started taking biology classes that fall. I did pretty well, finding the classes more interesting and easier than anything I’d done in chemistry. But I drank a lot, and hung out with a lot of drunks. There were lost weekends of social deviancy, of road trips and walking around on public beaches in tighty-whitey underwear. The police were involved on more than one occasion.
Also, I slipped into an anxiety ridden hell that locked me down emotionally and often physically. I will never forget the last day of classes before Thanksgiving of that year when I somehow found myself stuck in a building afraid to walk to my next class. I’d come out of the library, and breaking into a cold sweat of anxiety, I dashed into the adjacent building…a building where I’d earned miserable grades in my calculus classes. I needed to walk about a quarter of a mile to the center of campus to attend my literature and technology class. But I couldn’t do it. With shaking hands and sweaty brow I would go to step out side, get in people’s way, and be swept back in the door. This lasted twenty minutes until I finally stuck my head down and walked a b-line through hedges and across parking lots to my destination. The weekend went downhill from there.
The next semester I faired better. The true tonic was getting a job in an upscale garden center where I began learning the trade which I have worked in off and on till this day. One of the classes that helped me land such an enjoyable job was Dr. Gordon Hunter’s class on local flora which I enrolled in that spring. It continues to be the most enjoyable college class I have ever taken. With the warming days the class broke into little groups and set out to collect plants from fifty different families. Or maybe it was fifty different genus…it was a long time ago and I don’t rightly remember. I had also taken highly enjoyable entomology and invertebrate zoology classes around this time, both of which required a large amount of collecting so the numbers tend to run together.
I remember there was controversy over what to name the group: the flaming orchids or the big trees…college aged manly men that we were you can guess which name won out. At any rate we chose to study the Hardscrabble Hollow/Hidden Springs area of Jackson County. Its is adjacent to Wash Morgan Hollow which is administered by the Nature Conservancy due to the presence of endangered species in the micro-watershed so our little stake promised to be rich in wildflowers. We walked up and down the hills and hollows of the area, and scrambled up creek beds exploring the local flora, armed with Peterson’s Guide to Wildflowers, a contraption for pressing our discoveries, and 12-packs of Natural Light. I never said I wasn’t still a degenerate.
As that class ended I settled into the life of a working nurseryman for just over a year until another bad decision in June 1997 found me working in a factory cut off from a girl who wanted to marry me and just about all my friends. Somehow I was Calvinistic enough in all these situations to believe that I had no choice to reverse decisions. Stick it out, suck it up, learn to hold back your tears and do not expect too much good out of life. This is how adults earn steady paychecks.
I managed to get fired from the job at the end of the following March and immediately got back into the garden center and landscaping business. But I was still lonely. At the time I wasn’t very good at reaching out and getting to know new people. So that spring I reverted to my old habits of walking the woods. This time I wandered along the Natchez Trace. Using Peterson’s trusty and now worn guide I identified wildflowers at Jackson Falls, the Gordon House area, Fall Hollow.
It was at this time that I first had the idea to write a field guide. This one would be a field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I had the look of the book all planned out. I’d buy a new fangled “digital” camera and a bunch of 3½” floppy disks to carry around saving my pictures onto.
I transferred my job to Murfreesboro and went to school at Middle Tennessee State University, this time studying journalism. I told my advisor of the book I wanted to write. Having himself written a book about frogs he was sympathetic. I excelled for two years in my journalism classes then joined the Navy, shipping out for Officer Candidate School in February 2000. From 2001 until Spring 2005 I spent only 14 months in the United States. It was great. I won’t say the Navy corrected all my short comings but it did answer a lot of the “what-if’s” that had been holding me back. Someone else finally wrote the field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I saw it in a book store shortly after coming back from Iraq and just smiled. The field guide had been a worthy idea.
Which brings me to walking around in the woods collecting wildflowers on April 21, 2009.
When I left the Navy in late 2006 I had vague ideas about what I wanted to do: I wanted to write copy and landscape at the professional level. Well. I couldn’t find work writing copy and I didn’t know how to landscape like a professional. So I became a land surveyor. For the nine months it lasted that was probably the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. As one who likes to wander the woods land surveying offers ample opportunity to bushwhack through dense thickets, walk old fence lines, and use historical documents to identify the work of others. I worked my way up to junior party chief status before receiving a call from the State of Tennessee offering me a job as a water quality enforcement officer. I took it and went from being in the woods to being deeply ensconced behind a desk on the sixth floor of the L&C Tower in downtown Nashville. That lasted five months in which time I surfed until one day I found the end of the Internet. There was no pot of gold, just a 404 Error.
A man of action and entrepreneurial tendencies stifles in a government job. I was earning an easy, steady paycheck but wasn’t adding anything to my tool box of skills. So I quit. I found the most high end garden center in Tennessee’s most affluent zip code and got to work. I reacquainted myself with plant material (what a phrase to one who loves wildflowers and the woods). I learned to landscape and design, putting the diverse array of plant characteristics and habits I had committed to heart to work forming a cohesive picture, melding individual elements into a living, exciting landscape.
The next move as of this writing is to head back to Murfreesboro and earn a masters degree in biology. The Navy provided the money for it years ago and I need it for credibility as a nature writer. But a man in his mid-thirties needs to be making his way in the world as well so I’m starting a landscape design company.
Today walking out into the woods I can enjoy the wildflowers of a beautiful spring in a way I never have before. Even after a winter such as one the one just past, the harshest in years, the flowers lay dormant in the ground, waiting for the light, the warmth, knowing the sun was going to shine again. Aside from rebirth wildflowers have always represented a period of refocusing to me: a season has past followed by months of cold, bitter numbness. But buried in the ground, existing in the rhizomes and seeds, encoded, entwined, infused in the mystery that is DNA, each wildflower knows it has a purpose to fulfill. All it is waiting for is the time and place, a new season of growth announced by the return of the sun.