Nature: An Unrequited Love

As Valentines approaches, I’d like to declare my undying and unrequited love for nature.

Nature, of course, doesn’t care about me. Red in tooth and claw and all. But, like other quasi-relationships I’ve known, a lack of reciprocity doesn’t phase me.

This love for nature has now led me into the maw of the beast – back into the classroom, as a high school Earth & Environmental Science teacher. As of last week, I’m full-time teaching, so you’ll see me on here a little less. And since our passions are best kept as side pieces, not spouses, I think this arrangement will work out fine.

Though the curriculum for my course is light on native botany, I’ll be identifying plants with my students all the same. Because I love plants, and I share that love with my students. Or least sow the seeds of interest.

Part of the reason I like plants so much is that I know them by name.

Take Liriodendron tulipifera, for example, tulip poplar. Pretty leaf, prettier name. Or Baccharis halimifolia, oxeye daisy, the decor of the backshore. Pinus palustris, Quercus alba, Magnolia grandifolia. These names just roll right off the tongue. They sound like someone you’d like to meet, like to keep around. And they are.

I learned plants from ID books, guided nature hikes, and friends. And from Dr. Jolls at ECU. She took a hands-on, free-ranging approach to education, requiring us to attend field trips and collect specimens for study. The forest, the riverside, the pond. We followed her through the manicured landscape of campus and zigzagged single-file along overgrown trails, while she introduced us to our leafy neighbors.

To follow someone who knows every plant’s name, habits, life cycle, and range is a special joy. I wish I got to do it more often. Instead, now I’m leading those hikes, though I know a fraction of what Dr. Jolls knew.

It’s not her fault – she taught well, and she taught hard. During her tests, we had to identify our new friends on sight. We were confronted with a table of vaguely familiar leaves, flowers, and seeds, plus one plant we’d never seen, to suss out with Radford, Ahles, and Bell’s Dichotomous Key to the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas.

Dr. Jolls was my favorite teacher, Botany my favorite class.

Yet I wasn’t a good student. I was sometimes late, I doodled on my notes, and I was easily distracted. And to make it worse, Dr. Jolls was my advisor (my major was Biology). In subtle words, she hinted that I wasn’t showing the signs of a serious scholar. She asked what I wanted to do after graduation. By then, my original plan of medical school had evaporated – I’d chosen medicine because it seemed like the job where you learned the most. But I didn’t like dealing with sick people. Just learning.

I had no plans after graduation. Teaching, maybe? I said.

Dr. Jolls face relaxed, and she nodded, relieved. Yes, now there might be a good fit. She suggested an option designed for prospective teachers. I’d sit in a high school science classroom for an hour a week and observe, while working with a local Science Olympiad group for their upcoming competition. They needed help with the Botany event.

I met the high school teacher, and she walked me around campus. On the walk, I paused to pick a leaf from a bush and put it in my mouth. Sugarleaf, I said confidently. Dr. Jolls had just shown us the plant the week before. Sugarleaf was delicious. But this plant wasn’t delicious.

The science teacher watched me with the sort of expression you save for people in public in their underwear. “That’s an oleander!” she cried. “It’s terribly toxic!”

I spit it out, knowing she was right. My authority had been compromised. And my health.

But she let me teach those science olympian kids anyway, two of them, a boy and a girl – teenager-cool, impossible to impress. I got so into it. I collected plants and quizzed them. I took them on walks around their school campus, pointing out the differences between poison ivy and English ivy. I created an entire website dedicated to plant ID for Science Olympiads. I drew my own pictures for the site and colored them in MS Paint.

And that experience led me to a wetland plants course in graduate school, where I earned a Masters of Arts in Teaching, accumulated a hundred hours toward an environmental educator degree, and put in eleven years as a high school science teacher. I read every gardening book in the Brunswick County Library system. I continue to seek knowledge of every native plant in a 100-mile radius. I pine with an unrequited love for nature, while three more classes of teenagers follow behind me.

I blame the oleander toxins.

– Jessi Waugh