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- some resources for weed recognition - in the order
of my learning
First there were books: Or, before that,
there was my mother, from whom I learned the names of flowers.
And my grandfathers, Gustaf Persson with his hospitable garden
(last house before the meadows) and Gustav Ekeblad with his growing
collection of wildflowers: HE could even tell us the names of
different grasses. So there were footsteps to walk in.
But the books have been there for a long time
as well. As a child and teenager I spent many summer hours with
grandfather Gustaf's copy of Ursing's
Svenska Växter (printed in 1945) - fascinated
in a bookish way by the keys, playing around with them as a kind
of decoding game. That worn old copy is now in my hands. Together
with the almost as old copy of Bolin &
von Post's Floran i färg (first published
in 1950) Ursing was the resource closest at hand when I started
these S-weed walks. I had used the same two books as guides for
the compulsory 200 wildflowers to be captured on cards
under plastic when I was in the teacher education program back
in the 80s.
I got the Bolin & von Post as a prize at
school when I was twelve. Since
it didn't have a key, just pictures and descriptions, I somehow
respected it less than grandpa's Ursing at the time. Later as
I cultivated more of a practical interest in identifying wild
flowers that I had actually SEEN, the crisp drawings were quite
useful, for filling in distinctions in the expanding lattice of
what I could tell without helpers.
Then there was the Web: For an online
pursuit like the S-weeds it has been natural to also look for
identification resources on line. I soon found my way to Den
Virtuella Floran at the Swedish
Museum of Natural History - an excellent resource for Swedish-speakers,
with many useful pointers to distinguishing characteristics between
easily confused species. Another set of botanical images of Swedish
origin - but now widespread on the Net - is Lindman's Bilder
ur Nordens Flora - beautiful illustrations, but often
oldfashioned naming practices (it was printed in 1917). These
images and texts have been on the Web since 1992, part of the
early explorations in Projekt Runeberg. The rest of my Websearching
has yielded more randomly visited results. I plan to put some
of the links into a list.
Last but not least there are people:
Some five months into the weed walks, a growing sense of too much
uncertainty about too many difficult identifications of withered
winter weeds told me that books and other canned resources just
weren't enough: I needed people. (That might not surprise
YOU as much as it surprised me.) As is my preferred way, I consulted
the Web and used email - and was lucky to receive a friendly response
and some asked-for corrections from Roger Eriksson, researcher
and webmaster at the Botanical
Institute of Göteborg University. What more, he put me
in contact with Botaniska
föreningen i Göteborg and its truly remarkable secretary,
Erik Ljungstrand.
Browsing through my site you will notice that
I have taken some care to say thanks to people for all sorts of
contributions (mostly in electronic form) - and that Erik's name
is by far the most commonly occurring in this context. In fact,
his name would have been on many more pages - it just started
to look too repetitious to mention it as often as warranted. Erik
has been, and still is an invaluable resource - he has an incredible
eye for botanical detail (in images and in the field) and the
most astonishing memory for the relevant facts. Best of all, he
seems to enjoy answering my endless questions - and some of the
things that I find by surveying my domain so closely have turned
out to be rarities to cherish.
And then books again: Learning
from the botanists of Göteborg has brought more books into
the game. For one thing, I observe that in the field (excursions
outside my weed domain) they still swear by the keys of Krok
& Almquist, Svensk Flora. (I've still got my
mother's old copy from school.) For another thing, I have finally
updated from my old guide books to a more current flora: Mossberg,
Stenberg & Eriksson, Den Nordiska Floran - which
allows me to upgrade my naming practices to the 90s (there's a
new edition coming soon, but I just HAD to have it) - and makes
me drool with envy at the watercolor illustrations by Mossberg.
It also ups the ante of my weed identification by including numerous
subspecies. That's roughly where I am at the moment of the closing
of the first S-weed year: learning at the level of Nordiska
Floran. I also overhear the botanists (I go to excursions,
where I take a lot of pictures of people taking pictures) talking
about further channels for keeping at the cutting edge of the
(everchanging) naming practices, but I'm still waiting for the
first signs in myself of wishing to be that much in the know.
(How correct do I want my craft to be?) (Uhm: in 2004 I guess
I'm getting there. Oh, and when it came, I promptly bought the
new, augmented edition of Mossberg &
Stenberg, Den Nya Nordiska Floran. Not forgetting
the Flora Nordica, Västergötlands Flora,
et cetera, et cetera...)
So. All in all, and with these helpers and more,
my approach to the Weeds has been a long, intermittent process
of learning, reinforced twelvefold this year of weed walking.
Weed life has become so much richer in my eyes - but I STILL can't
tell apart other than a few characteristic grasses! (This, in
2004, is changing, too - but slowly).
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