A Monday without Phenology

 Nature's Notebook

After yesterday's cold front and snow showers, Monday morning looks to be a chilly one.  After all, Sunday's high temperature was only 38°.  I'm sure the Nature's Notebook folks, whoever is on duty, will be out in the CWG taking measurements.  If I'm lucky, the weather will be warmer by the time I've been vaccinated.  

The question du jour is when will that be?  The State of New Mexico has a well-designed registration system and we're registered.  Then it's only a matter of time until we're called.  There's some confusion because of the classification system  ̵̶̵  are we I-B or I-C?  Soon enough, we'll know. 

Braiding Sweetgrass

I've been reading the delicious Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer.  It's a lovely paean to botanical knowledge, both Western scientific and indigenous.  Tonight's chapter was about her lost Potawatomi native tongue and the point of view that language brings to the table of perceptions.  

Speaking of plants, rocks, waters, and mountains as animate objects comes easy to me; my teddy bear collection is alive; my cats are sentient beings.  I great them with "I see you," which elevates them to my equal.  Curiously, I've learned that it is a Swahili greeting as well.  

While we botanists lionize the Latin binomials instigated by Linnaeus, there is much to be learned if we do not forget the indigenous names for plants.  I am reminded of the story told by W. Matthews in an 1886 article entitled "Navajo Names for Plants." 

On another occasion I met the same Indian carrying, in the fold of his blanket, some specimens of Pectis angustifolia, a plant which on the dry mesas of New Mexico does not attain a height of more than two or three inches, but it has a delightful odor, like that of lemon verbena, and its infusion is used by the Navajos as a carminative. Their attention has therefore been drawn to it. The name given for the plant was so peculiar, signifying "a breeze blowing through a rock," tseganilchee, that I made no delay in getting an explanation from him. He led me to the top of a desert mesa where the plant grew fresh. Here he picked up a piece of sandstone about a foot square and three inches thick, and held it up to my nose, saying, "Do you smell anything on that stone?" The dry hard stone was of course inodorous. He then rubbed a little of the fragrant Pectis on one of the broad surfaces of the stone and immediately applied the opposite surface to my nostrils. The agreeable odor was at once distinctly perceptible through the rock. Some minutes later it could be detected in all parts of the fragment; but at first it was perceived at a point directly opposite to the point of application. Later he performed the experiment on a large stone nearly two feet thick; the results were the same as with the smaller stone, but more time was required for the odor to penetrate the sandstone. The odor, he said, went through the rock as if it were blown by a breeze, hence the name. 

Matthews has other wonderful stories to tell, but they will have to wait for another day.