Reading Nature
A Gift of Nature
Review of: Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide. Lawrence Newcomb. Illustrated by Gordon Morrison. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Unchanged since 1977, so any edition will do.
By Tom Murphy

When I was a young child, the only wildflower I could identify for sure was the dandelion. As an older child, living among lawns, I knew that one flower mostly as the bane of my summers, since I had to spend what seemed to be a good part of my days digging dandelions out of the lawn.

I haven’t dug a dandelion out of the lawn in years (nor did I require my children to) because I have found I rather enjoy the effect when the lawn lights up with bright yellow tufts of dandelion heads in the spring. Besides, the more I learn about dandelions, the more interesting I find them. I have never made dandelion wine, but we have eaten dandelion greens, and when we do dig them out of the gardens, I remind myself that they are a sign of fertile earth. John Burroughs noted that “the dandelion tells me when to look for the swallow,” and, sure enough, this year I noticed the barn swallows began swooping out of the barn just as dandelions began to flower.
I did finally learn the names of more wildflowers. But when I moved to northcentral Pennsylvania and began to live among meadows rather than lawns and saw the wildflowers that swept through the fields in waves of yellow, white, and purple, I felt inadequate because I knew so few of their names.  That’s when I also began to appreciate Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide.

Newcomb’s assumes nothing, so someone really can start from scratch (as I did). The key is the Key: answering five questions about the plant generates a three-digit number that can be found in the Locator Key, which tells you where to look in the book. The front matter of the book is full of drawings to illustrate the meanings of terms and what to look for in plants.

For example, the flower of the mountain laurel has five short lobes (the number 5 goes with that answer), it is a shrub (another 5) and its leaves are “entire,” no teeth or lobes (that answer gets a 2), creating the number 552. The Locator Key under 552 asks to choose between “evergreen, stiff and leathery” and “not evergreen.” Since the evergreen leaves are leathery, the last question is whether they are less than an inch long or not. The answer takes us to page 292 where the laurels are, including the mountain laurel. Going through the steps when you know the answer is not nearly as exciting as actually identifying something you don’t know. The book is nearly five hundred pages and it takes a long time to flip randomly through the drawings trying to find a match to the plant in front of you. The Locator Key that Newcomb created shortens the time more than any other guide that I have tried.

I remember when I first read the poem “For the Children,” by Gary Snyder, the former beat poet now known mostly for his nature writing. It talks about preparing for the difficult days ahead, because difficult days are always ahead, and they may be upon us soon. The poem concludes:

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light
 
The advice is striking. Staying together, connecting with your family and community, that makes sense, as does the idea of using only as much as we really need, since when times are tough, learning to get along with less is crucial. But why the flowers? I realized that Snyder is responding to that same urge that made me feel the flowers are important. Is it because their beauty is a free gift? Is it because knowing them is knowing the place where we live? Or is it because their return each year is part of some deeper mystery, and to know them is to share in the mystery?

Tom Murphy teaches nature writing at Mansfield University. You can contact him at readingnature@mountainhomemag.com.