botanical sketchbook
field botany notebook, 2025
I joined Lanny kaufer’s extended field botany class at the beginning of 2025. Basically, about 5 of us follow Lanny around and glean from his 30+ years of devotion to local flora. It’s definitely a get-out-what-you-put-in experience; my messy blob time shifted into focusing on fine details, and letting go of color to do so. It’s a different kind of slowing down. Sharpening the gaze. Entering the little infinities everywhere.
Like messy blobs, these sketches don’t know how to start or stop, they mostly float like a leaf tucked between pages i wonder if I will ever fill. Conversations in nature don’t have beginnings middles and endings. They feel unbound. Sometimes phrases land. Phrases and pencil marks. To me the impulse is self-soothing. What does it soothe? A mind that needs activity in order to pay attention. Even though drawings are often preoccupied with what they are becoming, they can map the journey of the eye over what it sees. The game of botanical drawings for me is pausing notions of style and imagination in favor of technical commitment (to the best of my ability) to what i see, blooming or not. Ironically, what i discover every time is that what i once dismissed as a common weed never is.
After one year of this practice, it’s clear to me that i will never understand the first thing about plants. I have too much thought blocking my ability to see and listen. The incessant humming of the silly rushing after god-knows-what or why. There cannot be an aim if we truly want to reestablish our broken connection with nature (aside from showing up). but I’m a part of a driven collective. Doing my part on behalf of that broken collective, even if it feels like an act of futility, is to pull over next to a “weed” and try to remember how to listen.
