Wildflowers of Tennessee, the Ohio Valley, and the Southern Appalachians
Dennis Horn, Tavia Cathcart, Tom Hemmerly, and David Duhl Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman
I particularly appreciate the dichotomous key to the mint family, but I first learned plant identification that way. For those who prefer to thumb through the book and judge by illustration, the color photography by David Duhl offers that opportunity for identification.
Duhl’s Photography and the folklore and ethnobotany contributions by Tavia Cathcart provide a perfect counterpoint to the scientific approach of Dennis Horn, an officer of the Tennessee Native Plant Society, and Thomas E. Hemmerly, Vanderbilt Graduate, and professor (at the time of publication) at Middle Tennessee State University. Hemmerly authored Wildflowers of the Mid South, Appalachian Wildflowers, and Ozark Wildflowers, the last two published by the University of Georgia Press. Sadly, Dr. Hemmerly is now deceased.
The book is an excellent field reference, listing over 1250 species in 90 plant families. Its geographic range covers a large oval including all of Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia, and parts of other states in the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia through Pennsylvania, as well as the Ozark portions of Missouri, and Arkansas. The range stops short of the Gulf Coast and Southern Atlantic Coast but extends northward to nearly touch the Great Lakes. Most of Ohio and Indiana are included.
The book’s size is appropriate for a field pack. The water-resistant soft cover is a bonus. This reviewer is highly pleased with his copy and its usefulness.
The Spring of My Life
Kobayashi Issa Translation by Sam Hamill Reviewed by Ray Zimmerman
The poet Issa is beloved throughout his homeland and Japanese schoolchildren commit his poignant nature poems to memory. Adults appreciate his humor, and scholars decry the self-pity shown through his work.
The winter fly I caught and finally freed The cat quickly ate
For this reviewer, the poetry of Issa represents a triumph of the human spirit. The events of his life transcend sadness to reach the heights of pathos and tragedy. His mother died when he was two years old, and his grandmother took over the responsibility of child-rearing. She sent him to study poetry with a local scholar at an early age. When he reached age eight; his grandmother died, and his father remarried. His stepmother abused him.
Mother I weep For you as I watch the sea Each time I watch the sea
He left home for Edo (now Tokyo) at age twelve to study poetry and Zen and became a homeless scholar on the streets. After many years as an itinerant poet, he returned home to nurse his dying father. In his fifties, he married a much younger woman, but their children died at an early age. The final child died due to care by an incompetent nurse, shortly after his wife’s death. He married again in his sixties, but he and his pregnant wife moved into a shed after their house burned. He died there, and shortly after, the wife gave birth to a daughter who lived to continue his line.
The Spring of My Life is haibun, a book of narrative prose with haiku, in the same tradition as Narrow Road to the Interior by Matsuo Basho. The following passage illustrates this point.
“Visiting my daughter’s grave on July 25th, one month after her death.
The red flower You always wanted to pick -- Now this autumn wind” Among the sad verses are many hopeful ones, truly beautiful, like the following: The distant mountains Are reflected in the eye Of the dragonfly
Issa is rated among the three great masters of haiku, along with Basho and Buson. The book, The Spring of My Life is a classic. Translator Sam Hamill included the full text and appended 250 haiku selected from the many thousands attributed to Issa. It is well worth the read.
My View of Walden
At one point, Thoreau describes the passing of a day as a microcosm of the year. He likens the dawn and sunrise to spring, midday to summer, sunset and twilight to autumn, and night to winter. Just as the day is a model of the year in his analogy, the year is a model of his book. The first two chapters are apologetics, his argument as to why he is at odds with the greater society as well as how and why he built the shack at Walden Pond and lived there. After these rather extensive arguments, he proceeds through the events of a year, collapsing his two years of living at the pond into one.
Although the book sold very few copies during his lifetime, it has become an icon of American Literature, and several nature writers have successfully used this same model of following the seasons through the year. Whether they consciously imitated Thoreau or never read his writing, they successfully employed this method.
Aldo Leopold, professor of forestry and founder of the science of wildlife management, followed the seasons on a rundown Wisconsin farm in his iconic work, A Sand County Almanac. Henry Beston followed them on the Beach at Cape Cod in The Outermost House, and Edwin Way Teale won a Pulitzer Prize for his Autumn Across America and the other three volumes in his series The American Seasons.
The appended essay, “Civil Disobedience,” is cited as having influenced such leaders for social justice as Mohandas Gandhi, the Reverend, Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and Nelson Mandela. Similarly, the influence of Walden on American literature is widely discussed in academic circles. The influence of Walden on nature writing as a model that focuses on passing seasons is less widely discussed, and perhaps not fully investigated.
Were these authors consciously imitating Thoreau, or did they simply find and use the same successful pattern independently? The answer is not readily apparent to this reviewer, but worth further investigation. Suffice it to say, readers who enjoyed Walden, or any of the above-cited works are likely to enjoy the others.