The Lamiaceae, of course. Get it? LAME-iaceae? I have now been working at my CLM internship for a full two weeks. I spent my first week in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I am working at the BLM State Office updating the Wyoming Sensitive Species list and revising biological assessments for threatened and endangered species in Wyoming.  This past week, I attended the CLM training workshop at the Chicago Botanic Garden, where I received hands-on training in field botany, met some great folks, and added to my botanical pun repertoire.

The training workshop was a fast-paced rundown of native plant families, field sampling techniques, and field navigation, among other topics. Our pack of 50 interns tromped all over the CBG and a neighboring forest preserve in search of prairie plants to key out, landmarks to navigate to by compass, and native wildflowers with seeds to collect. I’m enthusiastic about botany, but my position is largely focused on policy and I don’t have a lot of field experience.  So, it was really great to get this opportunity to get out in the field and practice navigating using a compass, identifying plants using a dichotomous key, and assessing a native population for seed collection.

Nearly-mature fruits of Cardamine concatenata in the foreground; CLM interns in the background. Lovely woodland all around.

Just as valuable as gaining these skills, though, was remembering that I was part of the larger CLM network of dozens of young people engaged in conservation and land management field work. I met people working all across the west, from the Mojave Desert and Palm Springs in California, north to Northern California and Eastern Oregon, west to Boise and Twin Falls, Idaho and into Montana, and back into Wyoming— to name just a few places. Despite going to a liberal, eco-conscious college and attending professional meetings, I had never felt such a high concentration of people of my own age and enthusiasm level about plants and conservation! And after many conversations about restoration practices and the best ways to mitigate the effects of the ecopocalypse, I’m excited and encouraged to know that there are so many folks all over the country who are doing good work and thinking about solutions to the same climate-change-induced problems that I’m worried about. And let me tell you, their botanical pun game is Ranunculus.

Not a Ranunculus, but still pretty! Indian paintbrush sighted outside Cheyenne at Vedauwoo.