Identify.

Sunday, February 2nd, 2020

There’s a volunteer we’ve encountered before at the Atlanta Botanical Garden who sets out an array of seeds, pods, cones, and, well, I guess, seed-like-thingies, and he (depending on your questions, interest, and/or attention span) challenges you to identify them or helps you guess them or simply tells you what they are.

Encountering this display with Sammy always gives me a quiet smile, because for her, this isn’t much of a challenge. But she’s also polite and friendly and she spent some time this sunny afternoon going through them with the volunteer guy…again.

She knows her trees and the stuff that comes out of trees in their quest for reproduction. Me, I dropped Biology in high school, but she grew up learning these diagnostically and taxonomically at the hand of parents who exposed her to lots and lots of growing stuff outdoors.

I did get Liriodendron Tulipifera right, however. Tulip Poplar. There’s a big one in our back yard, and darned if it doesn’t drop that stuff. And it’s one of the first trees she taught me three decades ago.