Darcie L. Tredwell, MA

WILDFLOWER PHENOLOGY

“Scale-moss, flat-leaves: Porella platyphylla,” the card said.

I started volunteering for the Far-a-way Museum last week as a citizen scientist. I’m working on a catalogue project and have been putting data into digital format from old photographed note cards. I am a citizen scientist wildflower phenologist data entry volunteer.

“Juncus effucus,” noted the next one for a scientific name.

The cards have information dating back to 1913! Somebodies grandfather, grandmother or their great-grand-parent wrote these cards up and started filling them out. They might have walked together every day trying hard to keep up with all the phylum in their field study. Someone might have started this project independently or maybe they had been employed for this field-study right after high school graduation. Or they started out as a volunteer in a scouting group. As I enter the digitally reiterated data, my imagination gets active. I imagine they grew older, got married, had kids and grandchildren between the years (reading between the lines). Periodically, someone had taken the time to
write up the data from these days.

Common name, “Prince’s Feather,” the field-worker titled one!

I believe these cards are not replaceable treasures. They appear to be old, 3 by 5-inch white paper, with one red-line bordering the top row and thirteen black-lines; they are inked where someone had divided into three columns by ruler and initiated the year-logs.
The first date listed is usually ‘1884’, overzealously because usually the first date that is
filled is 1913.

Copyright ©️ Darcie L. Tredwell (2024)