Drawing Botany Home–the first Teaser Tuesday!

Coming April 25, 2023!

https://rmbooks.com/book/drawing-botany-home/

In celebration and anticipation, please enjoy this teaser from the book’s prologue.

(More to come each Teaser Tuesday)

Prologue: The Comfort of Buttercups

(‘Reel’ available here https://www.instagram.com/p/Cm9nEYsN7X5/)

Ethnographers and geographers tell us that plants and place matter. Yet in a mobile world, both are easy to miss. In rural Montana, forty years ago, a Sunday afternoon erupts into conflict between my hippie mother and her American husband. When the argument turns ugly, I grab my younger brother’s hand flee out the back door finding comfort in the dependable appearance of spring-blooming buttercups.

It’s the first time I remember running out the backdoor, but it won’t be the last. I will gain much from plants: comfort, academic credentials, even financial security. But for years, I will understand their botany as the scientific discipline I first learned far from home. Then, in 2004, when a new job gave me reason to return to southern BC, I thought I was returning home to teach botany and ecology. Little did I understand how close my homecoming would come to failing. Discouraged and homesick, I did what I’d always done as a hippie kid when things got hard: I ran outside. I never went far—rarely more than a day’s drive—but I went with my field journal.  When my brother and I return to the most isolated of our childhood hippie houses in southern BC, recognition shudders through me. How many times, I wonder, did I flee family chaos for the tangled comfort of buttercups? How many of my family’s stories are woven with riparian willow and dogwood, shaded beneath a ponderosa pine, aching in the stubbled remains of a Douglas fir forest?  Faced with plants infused with memory and meaning, I finally understood how drawing plants in place was more than mere comfort; it was a practice that could question my most deep-seated assumptions about home and family, discipline and practice, place and community. It also, I realized, allowed me to learn not just about, but from plants. As a botanist and artist in search of a rooted life, what lessons could matter more?

Come with me.

 

New article asks if field journals can help us walk toward care

Sometimes the best gifts come as requests.  In June 2016, I was asked to give a keynote field journal workshop for a group of tourism educators gathering to think broadly about care–care for their students, for themselves and the land that we walk, whether as residents or tourists.

Photo credit: Jessica Silva

Being asked to give this keynote gave me permission to explore the history of field journals for what is known about the links between creative practices such as field journaling and care.  The paper that I wrote describing these links (as well as the directions for a page spread in five exercises) recently came out and the publisher has provided a link for 50 free downloads. You can find the article here:  http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/TXih7dc9eU2xpEUf6asF/full

And the unpublished version (with colour images) can be found here (scroll down to where it says PDF)

http://tru.arcabc.ca/islandora/object/tru%253A1644

I’ve always valued my field journal as a tool for paying attention, but writing this paper help me understand why field journals can be so much more.  Tourism educators (and others) talk about worldmaking or the processes by which what we do in the world shapes how we  see the world.  Goodman (1978) originally defined worldmaking as arising from the internal referencing inherent in any human activity whether it be science, art or craft. Much of it is unconscious, but every once in a while, something jars us out of the normal flow of our lives into “noticing.”  Such interpretive encounters, suggests Kellee Caton (2013, p. 345, quoting  Schwandt 2000) “always risk our previous ways of seeing the world.”  Many have argued that what most needs jolting is our perception of the boundary between nature/culture as this artificial boundary (unsupported by empirical evidence) limits our ability to to connect to and care for the natural world.

Here’s where I get excited.  By mixing science and art, drawing and text, outward and inward attention, I think illustrated field journals invite the interpretive encounters that can help challenge this  nature/culture dualism.  As a practice, illustrated journaling is not just embodied, skilled, and creative (all attributes that have been linked with care), it’s also inherently place-based.  Thus, my thesis is that illustrated journaling  predisposes our worldmaking so as to recognize existing connections between people and place.  In doing so, illustrated journaling facilitates the deep attending to the world that I believe is an important, and necessary, first step toward care.

Finally, speaking of not just care, but gratitude too.  This paper is dedicated to my “litter-mates”—the extraordinary group of field journalers who gather each summer to carry this tradition forward. I am grateful to journal within your midst and I have learned from you all.

References cited:

Caton, K. (2013). The risky business of understanding: philosophical hermeneutics and the knowing subject in worldmaking. Tourism Analysis, 18, 341–351.

Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.