“Touching grass”— Leaving our little digital bubbles and getting in contact with the natural world around us. It’s usually part of a joke when this phrase is typed out on the internet, but what it implies about our human need for connection with the plant world is real. As someone who’s been touching grass professionally for the last two and a half months, I think I’d do well to ponder it for a while. 

I had the wonderful opportunity late this August to attend a presentation at the local “food forest” by a Northern Cheyenne elder and his son. They are both ethnobotanists and spend their time learning about and sharing the stories of the Cheyenne’s traditional way of life and relationship with the plants of the region. They spoke of a people whose lives were intertwined with native plants not only out of necessity, but also voluntarily due to affection and desire for kinship with these spirits that surrounded them.  

“Every plant has its own story”, they said. On the table in front of them were many plants that I have seen on the forest this summer—Artemisia frigida “Woman’s sage” and Artemisia ludoviciana “Man’s sage”, ceremonial gifts; Ratibida columnifera “Rattlesnake medicine”, which reduces the effects of rattlesnake venom when chewed into a poultice and placed on an incision near the bite; Prunus virginiana “Chokecherry”, which Cheyenne would harvest in the late summer and fall to be crushed and dried into patties that would feed hungry mouths through the long winter.  

Their relationship to plants doesn’t end with the products that the plants provide; It extends to the inter-plant-personal—living being to living being. The elder and his son told about grandmothers laying out hearty meals at the feet of trees for them to enjoy, about how complimenting a particular patch of poison ivy on its beautiful sheen persuaded it to hold back with its itchy attacks, and always they imparted that we, humans and plants and even the soil, are all spirits connected through community as part of creation. 

I’m cheating a little with this blog post by merely recounting what I’ve heard (but that’s what stories are for, anyway). Here’s a bit about seed collecting. 

An attendee at one of the elder’s presentations once asked permission to take home some seed, so he told the attendee “you don’t need to take any seed—all you need to do is to touch the tree”. He told us, “plants have a way of following us home. There’s a magic about them. They’ll spring up in your yard”. I’ll take his word for it—there’s been many a day when the seeds of needlegrass burrow deep into the hem of my pants and spill onto the floor when I take my boots off at home. That said, I won’t be altering the protocol when we’re out in the field. We can’t count on enough needlegrass following us home to satisfy what we need for this project. We do need to actively harvest.  

It’s a different kind of relationship that we have with plants as seed collectors this summer, but I’d say it’s still one based on respect and mutual good will. We leave plants be when the population isn’t large enough or healthy enough to withstand the stress. We collect no more than one fifth of the seed to leave plenty for the seed bank in the soil. Some members of the botany crew have even told me that they say thank you to the plants when they collect seed or take a specimen. What we’re doing, while perhaps reparative and necessary only due to our own impact on plant life through development and contribution to increasing wildfire risk, is an act of love and care for the plants and for the world community that they are vital to. And we benefit greatly from their fruits and the fruits of our labor through the maintenance of the vitality and beauty of our public lands, which are nourishing to people in many ways. 

“When they are upset after being punished, children run and climb up high in a tree, not to come down until suppertime. Just touching the plant calms us down and takes away the bad feelings. When the child comes down and goes home, everything is alright again.” 

Like I said before, we’ve been touching a lot of grass, and other plants for that matter. We can be in a field for hours on end, stripping seed from heads of grass, inhabiting quiet save for the sigh of wind and the chirping of crickets. For me, it’s time with brain empty. We’ve had other people from the office come collect with us, and they describe it in a nicer way: “meditative”. Either way, all this grass touching does something for us. The same way that working in the garden, or walking through the woods keeps us grounded. It’s an inter-plant-personal relationship that we’re all lucky enough to enjoy this summer. Whether I’ve got my nose in the wild mint while at work, or my toes in the lawn playing corn hole on the weekend, I’m glad to have a connection with plants. I hope they’re happy too. 

Aspen Fleabane! Erigeron speciosus! Lost in a sea of purple Erigerons, where is the species we need? 

It’s month number two of the CLM internship for us here on the Big Horn National Forest. Things are heating up (to nearly record high temperatures in Sheridan, WY , at 105 degrees Fahrenheit!) which means things are approaching full swing up on the mountain, floristically. Several plants that are on our collection list have gone to seed. Many more are now in full bloom—including those in the genus Erigeron. 

The botanically uninitiated are faced with the “green wall” when first looking out on a leafy landscape, before learning to differentiate between the many plants that make up the community. With these fleabanes, we’re facing a new frontier—the “purple wall”. In some genera, there are only a few species in the state’s flora. In the genus Monarda, for example, there are only 2 species native to Wyoming, Monarda fistulosa (a plant on our target species list for collection!) and Monarda pectinata. This makes it pretty easy to be confident when we see our Monarda out in the field. Not so with fleabane. There are over 50 species in the Wyoming flora, and almost every single one has bright yellow disk flowers, and purplish to whitish ray flowers. 

We’ve found that quite a few of the other plant enthusiasts on iNaturalist share our confusion; we’ve showed up on the sites of several iNat observations of Aspen fleabane, and have found several different versions of plants that match the description of yellow disk, purple rays—so which is really Aspen fleabane?  

In this case, a pretty cool clue for where to look can be found in the common name! We’ve found many purple fleabanes that don’t look quite right when wandering through sagebrush, along lake shores, or up on rocky outcroppings; but when we find ourselves in stands of aspen, we find that the plants start to line up closer with our description of Aspen fleabane! That being said, there are still subtle distinctions between species that we have to watch out for—Erigeron subtrinervis, or Three-veined fleabane, looks very similar to Aspen fleabane and can also be found growing in stands of aspen, but instead of a smooth stem and leaves, it will have hairy stems and leaves. It’s a minute detail, but when we send our seeds to the seed nursery and extractory in Couer d’Alene, they’ll want to see a voucher specimen that fits the bill. 

It’s tough to find what we need, but we’ve still got a moment before these tricky purple flowers go to seed. In any case, a shady, lush stand of aspens is always a great place to be, so I won’t mind the search! 

More of a re-potting, really… Here we are in Sheridan, Wyoming! To the West, the Big Horn National Forest rises up from gentle foothills blanketed in Yellow Sweet Clover. Within the forest, the Cloud Peak Wilderness juts into the sky, Cloud Peak poking its crown higher than 13,000 feet! The air here is rarer than in the mountains familiar to me, Washington’s Cascades and Olympics. Just a few weeks ago, I plucked up my roots from my hometown of Seattle to embark on an adventure to learn the flora of the rest of the country and to provide a valuable resource for conservation projects in our National Forests: Native seeds!

It’s early in the season, especially at the higher elevations in the forest. Snow had just melted out of the montane meadows only a few weeks before we arrived in early June. This means many plants are just coming out, and the earliest blooms are now in flower. Still too early to collect seed! Right now, the Rocky Mountain Herbarium Specimen Database and iNaturalist have been our best friends as we use historic records to locate populations of plants on our collection list. Some of the best finds have been several great populations of Eriogonum umbellatum (Sulfur buckwheat) in flower that will be ready for collection in a week or two.

There’s a lot to know on any one Forest, and when we’re not out scouting populations for seed collection, we’re getting a grand tour of the scope of what a Forest Service botany crew works on day in and day out.  

We’ve been out with hydrologists planning the best spots for willow plantings in a wetland restoration site with beaver dam analogs. The willows need moist spots that won’t get too waterlogged, and they’ll need to be fenced in for protection (baby willows are tasty moose munch!)

We’ve documented locations of sensitive species, keying out the sensitive Linanthus watsonii in the field, which looks a lot like its more common cousin, Phlox hoodii. We located Linanthus very near to a popular climbing spot in Ten Sleep Canyon, which gets a LOT of traffic, so botanists here need to assess what special precautions should be taken to protect this special plant. 

Along the way, there have been plenty of Foresters to meet, landmarks to learn, and of course, plants to get excited about. We’re getting the lay of the land and picking up the lingo too—if you told us there’s Monarda past Burgess up on Freeze Out, we’d know exactly what you mean (and we’d be pumped!)