Ichi, ni, so-re!: Intro to Horticulture!

Ever since I was a kid I've been interested in plants. I liked to grow stuff. When I was in high school I had a really great garden. I'd be in it for hours and hours, all weekend long, every morning before school, every evening after. And it's not like I knew what I was doing. I would just plant everything and anything. It was so alive and everything was wonderous. There was order and then there was chaos and I just remember long afternoons, listening to the radio, digging, weeding, grooming, planting, pruning.

After I left for college, I didn't have a garden any more. I pursued literature and writing. I lived in apartment complexes. I had deadlines and finals and then later a day job, life experiences, all worthwhile and not regrettable. But there's always been this smoldering interest in plants that never went away. And then one day, dear friend Coke enthusiastically approached me with a fistful of printed out course offerings from Merritt College (5 minutes from my day job). Some classes were underlined and others were asterisked and others had little drawings around them. It was thanks to her that I finally said to myself, hey, I should DO this!

So I enrolled in a couple of horticulture classes this semester! Merritt's horticulture program is absolutely amazing, particularly for being a community college. They offer courses that some 4-year universities don't even offer. I originally wanted to take the Intro 101 class and start from the basics, but it was an all-day class, and there was just no way I could swing it with my job. They've got a night version of the class that I managed to get into. I'm also taking Plant Terminology, which teaches us how to identify features about plants so that later when they actually let me touch real live plants, I will be able to know what they're talking about. I haven't really been able to dig in the dirt or prune or whatever it is they do with plants. I've just been filling my brain. It's been feeling really sponge-like lately. I am really interested and curious and still have that wet-behind-the-ears enthusiasm so I'm sure that helps. I keep putting stuff in there, and I seem to be retaining all this info, and it's not like things are getting crowded in my brain, not yet. Just fill, fill, fill. Study, memorize, read.

This whole science field is very peculiar to an English major like me. Writing and critique is so fuzzy and amorphous and perspective-driven. But science? Uh-uh. There's no arguing my way out of the corners in this field. There's a whole lot of black and white and even the grey areas come into sharp focus if you point your microscope hard enough at things. And that's something I love about it. The specificity. My terminology class is really challenging. I just got back my first exam. I scored 98.5% and I'm not happy about it. I know that most of the points and half-points (there was extra credit too) I got docked were for my carelessness. One question was to identify the surface of a leaf. There were many leaves and I just felt one, but I would have gotten the question right if I had felt the others.

But that is learning experience. I think one of the good things about learning all that other life stuff, is that you learn how to learn. Learn where you make mistakes, and to recognize them as mistakes so that you can correct them later. Take lessons from your experience. I may be answer a question incorrectly, but instead of self flagellation, I just realize, oh I was wrong because I need to take the time to observe, or to not repeat a pattern of assumption, or that with patience you'll come to understand something more deeply.

Tonight I was dissecting flowers. I've actually been dreading this. A couple weeks ago we were studying leaves, which are pretty easy compared to the complexity of flowers (not to say that leaves are simple things. Really! Go out and look at all the leaves you come across and pretty soon you will see an amazing diversity of shape and form. I never realized how many different kinds of leaves there were until I actually looked at them). I was actually scared. Yeah, that's it, now that I've said it out loud. I mean, there is so much going on in a flower, what if I can't see all the pieces? What if I come across a great expanse of unknown territory? What if I don't know what I'm looking at? What if I get it wrong? And I dissected my first flower tonight. I just said, eh, what the heck, and started hacking away at it. Our project is to dissect 16 flowers and I wanted to get an early start. When I was done with my first flower, I said to myself, well, I've got these other ones. I wasn't using them for my project, so why not just cut them all up for the heck of it without the pressure of having to document every stamen and ovary? And I did. And it was so much fun. There was flower carnage everywhere: