Beautiful photos. I love how wilted and dejected they look, almost as if they're acting melodramatic, like they're sighing and say, "Oh god it's so hot. I can't even pick up my head." This brings me back to one summer a long time ago when I was 9 and my parents sent me to "Nature Camp". Well, they sent me to what I wanted, which was Art Camp, but the hippies who put on the program required that if you went to Art Camp in the afternoon you had to go to Nature Camp in the morning. I wasn't that into nature at age 9. But even though I complained at the time (especially when we went on a surprise 10 mile hike!) I have some wonderful memories of some of the things we did. This was in southern Delaware, and I'm not exactly sure where we went, but we would go on hikes through the woods every day and they would teach us how to identify each of the trees and plants by their leaves. We would dig up the red clay from under the soil and I think we actually used it to make clay pots. And we made our own 'root beer' by digging up a small Sassafras tree and boiling the root with sugar. We picked, boiled and ate baby milkweed pods, and we dyed fabric using poison Sumac berries. I remember these cauldrons of dark purple water where we boiled the cloth with Sumac berries over open fires.
Ever since then I've wished I could learn how to identify medicinal and edible plants in nature (like one of those Bear Grylls programs) and I'd love to know the names and properties of all the plants in my area.
When I lived in Sweden I knew people in the linguistics department who knew the names of every tree, flower and shrub within 10 miles of their houses, and they knew which of them did and didn't grow in the neighboring town 10 miles over. I envy that sort of knowledge.
Wow, super cool comment. I am now on the journey of learning about such things. Sassafras is a new friend of mine that I met last year!
Thank you! It was the kind of thing I thought was much cooler in retrospect because at the time I was kind of a whiny 9 year old about going on hot, itchy hikes. We also picked chickory and made a tea out of it.
Sassafras is pretty cool. I would love to make my own root beer now with Sassafras and one of those carbonation kits ;-)