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5 opere 151 membri 2 recensioni

Opere di Edgar Denison

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Informazioni generali

Data di nascita
1904-08-31
Data di morte
1993-08-14
Sesso
male
Nazionalità
Germany
Luogo di nascita
Stuttgart, Germany

Utenti

Recensioni

A very good, usable reference guide to wildflowers of the Missouri plains.
 
Segnalato
Devil_llama | 1 altra recensione | Apr 15, 2011 |
Growing up, I saw them as weeds. Some of them I had to chop out of corn rows with a hoe or pull up by hand. They sprouted up among the wheat and oats that we mowed and shocked and threshed. They added color to fields of alfalfa and lespedeza, but they didn’t make good hay. Cut and raked, they shriveled and shattered, only adding chaff to the loads we hefted into the barn loft.

Then, as a 4-H’er collecting insects for my entomology project, I learned something of how their pollen attracted and fed insects and how insects spread the pollen on their wings, their feet, their antennae, their proboscis and, hence, spread the plants. Wildflowers, I learned to call them.

Then, as a young man, I met a vivacious young coed, whom I knew almost immediately I wanted to marry. She was enrolled in a field botany course, required to collect and identify wildflowers for her project. I stopped along the roadsides, as I drove through Middle Tennessee and all the way up to Elizabethtown, Kentucky. My favorite was a brilliant blue one that grew in patches rivaling Texas blue bonnets. But I was disappointed that it faded to a puny white by the time I delivered it to her. She would have to come with me and see the brilliance of their blue as they waved in the breeze. I mistakenly identified them as cornflowers. They were chicory, I learned.

But the one with the most interesting story and form turned out to be Queen Anne’s lace—one of those weeds I had dealt with growing up. It consisted of hundreds of white florets with one deep red floret at the center. One year it would grow as a raggedy weed, called a wild carrot; the next year it would blossom and then its seeds would gather themselves into a pod, giving it the name bird’s nest plant.

Some twelve years later, sentimentalist that I am, I gave my vivacious wife and mother of our five children a special gift for Mother’s Day: Missouri Wildflowers by Edgar Denison, published by the Missouri Department of Conservation (1972). We had learned to collect wildflowers not by picking them but by sighting them and noting the day and place so that we might retrace our steps and see them again next year. (I don’t think it ever turned out quite that way, but at the time it seemed like a good idea.) On June 1, we spotted a yellow wood sorrel and blue spiderwort. The next day we saw a cinquefoil or five finger, a wild four-o’clock, and a daisy fleabane. On the 8th we sighted an ox-eye daisy and a Deptford pink. June 18 proved to be a very good day too, bringing us to the brown-eyed Susan, a trumpet vine, and the good old Queen Anne’s lace. By July 13, we had found a jewelweed or spotted touch-me-not, and the next day a horsemint or wild bergamot. There were other days and other blossoms. There was goat’s beard and the common elderberry, the golden ragwort or squaw-weed, the evening primrose, the black-eyed susan, the prickly pear, coneflowers, dog fennel, goldenrod, sneezeweed, pokeweed (more beautiful as berries than as flowers), lots of yucca and ragweed and ironweed and common milkweed, and tall blazing stars. Every Sunday, on our way to church, we saw waves of blue, cornflower and chicory. Now I knew the difference.

Even as a child I had admired the bull thistle: soft, delicate lavender blossoms in a prickly bulbous pod with spines growing right up to the flowerhead. Attractive but bristly. I thought then they would make a lovely photograph; they do.

By now we had learned for ourselves what Denison reminded us of on p. 92: “There are no ‘weeds’ in nature. Every plant has a purpose.” We understood, too, what he meant when he said, on p. 128, “Don’t take anything from the natural world unless you can put something of equal value back.” What Denison calls “the showiest of all milkweeds,” growing to three feet tall and crowned with masses of brilliant orange flowers, is the butterfly weed. We wanted them near us, and the butterflies they attracted. One year we attempted a bed of them in our backyard. We nurtured them patiently, but they do better in the wild, we discovered.

Now, we have to admit that the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Wildflowers: Eastern Region has sharper photographs and more accurate descriptors. Furthermore, we admit that seeing the flowers without being able to name them is better than seeing them in a book and not being able to find them. But there is poetry in their names, and Missouri Wildflowers invites us to the fields and woods, to the marshes and meadows and rocky roadsides. “Gather ye wildflowers while ye may,” was the inscription I penned in the gift book. We did, and we do.

[For sharper photos and updated information, see the 6th edition of this book, also in my library.]
… (altro)
 
Segnalato
bfrank | 1 altra recensione | Aug 14, 2007 |

Statistiche

Opere
5
Utenti
151
Popolarità
#137,935
Voto
½ 4.4
Recensioni
2
ISBN
4

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