We paddle across the big blue water of Murtle Lake in BC’s Wells Gray Provincial Park, just the two of us: me and my friend Libby. Two days ago, we abandoned our respective homes—mine, four hours south, Libby’s nearly nine hours distant in the lowlands of Washington state. Driving north, kayaks piled atop Libby’s car, gear stuffed in the rear, I’d known how my absence would burden Marc with more than his share of child care, dog walking and housecleaning. Yet the moment my body felt the first rhythm of paddling—dip, push forward with opposite arm, dip, push forward—I could only be glad. This is my first wilderness trip since Marc and I decided, kayaking on BC’s coast, to have a child. Maggie will turn 11 years old next month. For nearly 12 years, the burden of pregnancy, the full-throttle of early childhood care, and then the demands of a new job have tied me to the front country. Off my bow, Libby paddles steadily. In front of me, mountains run from lake to sky, their reflections pooling in calm water. With no obvious human imprint, the view feels like a salve I’d nearly forgotten to need. I never meant to be gone for so long.
If, before Maggie, my life revolved around wild places like this one, 12 years has been long enough for me to forget that success in the backcountry depends as much on what you leave behind as what you bring. I know: the evidence is leaking in my forward hatch, oozing up against freeze-dried rice and prepackaged curries. Unable to imagine a week without fresh vegetables, I’d plotted Tupperware dimensions against the volume of my kayak’s hatches, counting out peas and carrots and avocados and red peppers. But vegetables belong in the garden, not here. Two days in, and my vegetables have already collapsed into a mess of crushed skin and bruised flesh.
Here, where the landscape opens, paddle stroke by paddle stroke, where fingers of glassy lava slide into shadows of blue, where cedars live for centuries without the touch of human hand, even the word “vegetable” sounds out of place. The shape, colour and taste of all vegetables reflect their allegiance to a single species—us. A “botany of desire,” as Michael Pollan puts it.
Here, where the landscape opens, paddle stroke by paddle stroke, where fingers of glassy lava slide into shadows of blue, where cedars live for centuries without the touch of human hand, even the word “vegetable” sounds out of place.
There’s no doubt that by hitching their stars to ours, the plants whose roots, stems or fruits fill our kitchens have expanded far beyond their native range. But at what cost? Today, geographers argue that the path to the Anthropocene was paved, at least in part, with vegetables. That is, as Europeans first transported, and then cultivated, plants like potatoes, wheat and corn across the world, they laid the caloric foundation that subsequently allowed our species to grow into a planetary-level influence.
Globally, our impact now rivals that of the Pleistocene’s glaciers, but we depend upon a botany divorced from place, one that has transformed plants from living beings into inanimate commodities that can be bought and consumed with little knowledge of the soil in which they were grown. In the Anthropocene, even our botanical imagination has been globalized.
Hundreds of thousands of millennials follow “plantfluencers” via Instagram and Pinterest, but few who appear in my botany labs can identify the native species found in the sagebrush steppe that surrounds Kamloops. Even fewer know of the rich, wet interior rainforest that sits in the headwaters of our watershed. To be honest, I’m conflicted. As a botanist, I’m delighted by any trend that counteracts the plant blindness that has worried my discipline for decades. But, as an ecologist committed to the botany of BC, I’m concerned when we appear to care more about plants selected by industrial supply chains than by the climate outside. If naturalist Robert Michal Pyle was right—that any effort to conserve natural ecosystems or species must begin with rebuilding our experience with them—then we need to rebuild experience with this flora. The question, of course, is how?
Hundreds of thousands of millennials follow “plantfluencers” via Instagram and Pinterest, but few who appear in my botany labs can identify the native species found in the sagebrush steppe that surrounds Kamloops
Few, I think, would argue with the importance of direct contact. Here, in Murtle Lake, I’ve been revelling in a botany that is clearly rooted in place. Western red cedar, black cottonwood, Douglas fir and western hemlock: all species whose history with this landscape, this part of North America, far exceeds my own. But rebuilding experience with a flora demands more than just listing its species. The word “experience” comes from the Latin experientia, meaning “a trial, proof, or When Mountains Move experiment.” The work that has most tested me, of course, is the mix of art and science contained within the cover of my field journals. I know field journals like mine were an important tool in the European project to name, claim and transport the world’s botany, as their entries made the lives of rooted plants more visible and definitely more portable. Historian Mary Louise Pratt defines contact zones as “the spaces of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separate come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations.”
Historically, such contact zones resulted in conflict, coercion and radical inequity between the colonizers and the colonized. Yet contact zones are never one-sided. Historians and geographers tell us that European illustrated travel accounts, like any act of mapping, were “creative, sometimes anxious moments in coming to the knowledge of the world, “that the writing and sketches collected in these journals were never completely objective. In creating these travel accounts, many Europeans appeared to have become entangled in a series of difficult negotiations between their assumptions and the experience of travelling the field."
Certainly, since returning to Kamloops, no tool has been more important in storying a place, maybe even a home, for me. Last year, in writing the application to fund this trip into Murtle Lake, I explained that I couldn’t rebuild experience with plants with a sampling quadrat, but I might with an illustrated field journal. Given the role that field journals had played in the European colonial practice that helped separate us from them, ecology from wealth, culture from nature, what would be more fitting, I argued, than to co-opt their form to help rebuild our experience of plants in place? It worked. Or at least my proposal succeeded. That’s the reason that, on a Tuesday in mid-September, I can be here with Libby, one of my first field journal mentors, rather than in a lecture hall. The reason art supplies fill an entire dry bag in my kayak. The reason I’ve come to this lake.
Given the role that field journals had played in the European colonial practice that helped separate us from them, ecology from wealth, culture from nature, what would be more fitting, I argued, than to co-opt their form to help rebuild our experience of plants in place?
Murtle Lake. For nearly a decade, I’ve heard its praises: the largest motor-free lake in all of North America; a lake bounded not by roads but by an intact, inland rainforest, dripping with moss, resplendent with big trees. A lake accessed only via a two-and-a-half-kilometre portage; a lake whose waters run free for 200 kilometres before flowing through the heart of Kamloops. In looking for an experiential lodestar, no ecosystem seemed more fitting to journal than the wild, wet botany of Murtle Lake.
But, two days in, all I’ve got is an odd aphorism that pops into my head as loons call off my bow and dragonflies zip across clear water: “It’s important to go where vegetables sorrow.” Yet how is my impulse to carry vegetables into Murtle Lake any different than the human desires that carried European crop species to North America? The bruised vegetables in my kayak are a rebuke: If I’ve insisted on carting vegetables into the wild, do I really think I’ll be able to gather stories to compete with the slick botany of an Instagram feed? What the hell am I doing?
Appears with permission of the publisher from the book Drawing Botany Home: A Rooted Life, by Lyn Baldwin, published by Rocky Mountain Books in 2023. Available wherever books are sold.
A beautifully illustrated natural history memoir that reminds the reader that re-storying our relationship with the plants of home can be our first step in restoring the world.
In a world made precarious by human mobility, all of us can learn from those who root in place. Plants surround us, yet all too often we ignore their quiet and complex lives. When a new job brings botanist and artist Lyn Baldwin back to her childhood home in southern British Columbia, she is challenged to confront both the cost of her mobility and the assumptions of her profession. If nearly three decades spent in motion gave Lyn scientific credentials and a career, it also made her a stranger to home and country. Lonely and homesick, Lyn runs outside. She doesn’t go far—rarely more than a day’s drive from Kamloops, BC—but within the pages of her field journal, the slow confluence of art and science allows Lyn to learn not just about but from the green wisdom of her neighbours.
Tutored by the plants of forest and garden, wilderness and wetland, Lyn realizes that her botany never has been, and never will be, a placeless science. Instead, Drawing Botany Home gives Lyn the metaphors to reconcile the dark horror of settler/Indigenous relations and the hard edges of her own childhood: poverty, a traumatic fire, unwanted stepfathers, a hippie mother.
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