Jonathan Ice: In Search of the Wily … Phlox

26 April 2021
Jonathan Ice

I have been legally blind my whole life, and so my visual world has been much hazier than that of my sighted friends. Growing up I knew that there were dandelions, lilacs, roses, and even “flocks” (I later found it was phlox), but plants and their flowers were largely undifferentiated in my mind. Though I learned a few more things over the next 35 years, my ignorance of plant life remained profound.

I married Karla Buntrock in 1989, and just before we started seeing each other seriously she had taken a Minnesota plant life course and had gained a strong interest in prairie and its biota. We got field guides and started trying to identify flowers as we encountered them in our visits to state parks and other “parks with nature.” Being somewhat obsessive-compulsive, I started keeping a life list of wildflowers encountered wherever we would go – analogous to the life lists that serious birders keep. I have done this ever since.

If I’m going to study nature, for me, there is a special advantage to examining flora. Birds, mammals, and other critters are usually too far away for me to see them with any definition, and they move around too quickly for me to locate them with a monocular. Plants, on the other hand, have the good sense to stay put and let me get close enough to examine them in detail. Especially if I am out on the hunt with someone who can spot the flowers, I can get up close and work on the identification.

One of the beauties of “botanizing” is that there is at least the potential of a great find in the most prosaic of landscapes. Dramatic mountain vistas are wonderful, but we have found plants of great interest and beauty in the steppes of Montana and flatlands of our Iowa. And in the process I have found that all parts of the plant are of interest, as there is such diversity of form in blooms, leaves, stems, and fruits. The diversity of nature is amazing! When I was twenty I never would have dreamed this would become one of my great joys in life.

— Jonathan Ice

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