The Botany of Christmas

I come from a long line of European women who did a lot of baking: fresh bread and buns, pies, squares, cookies, and strudels. Although my mother and grandmother baked throughout the year, Christmas was my favourite time because that’s when the really special treats were made, things that you didn’t eat just every day: hot roasted chestnuts, fruitcake, butter tarts, honey cake, shortbread, and chocolate Yule logs.

Learn more on:

Christmas Nuts

Christmas Spices

Christmas Fruits

When people find out that I study and collect wild plants I suspect that they have visions of me tromping through the woods to study beautiful orchids and majestic wildflowers. The fact of that matter is that attractive plants, orchids in particular, are pretty well-studied compared to many other groups.

Orchids attract a devoted cult of nature lovers who, for fun on their weekends and vacations, wander through bogs and remote forests in the hopes of discovering new species or taking a perfect photograph of a rare Lady’s-slipper. In fact Manitoba has three non-profit organizations (Nature Manitoba, Native Orchid Conservation Inc. and Conserve Native Plant Society Inc.) that are involved in some way or another in the appreciation, documentation and conservation of orchids. So I’m not too worried about the orchids-I know that they are being meticulously documented by their legions of fans.

What I am worried about are the ugly plants-the wind-pollinated ones with tiny flowers that grow in very specific microhabitats. These plants are either completely overlooked or regarded as weeds and stepped on. They are like neglected younger siblings in a large family that only get attention when they do something bad, like grow in someone’s garden or in a crack in the sidewalk. We don’t know much about the distribution and ecology of these ugly species and since they are unattractive and sometimes hay-fever inducing, no one loves them enough to study them. No one but me. I’ve developed and odd fondness for these homely plants because they are a challenge to locate and identify. I find it very satisfying to be able to identify plants that most amateur and even some professional botanists ignore.

One of my recent projects has been to identify “taxonomic gaps” in the botanical collection here at the Museum. I prepared a list of plants that I know have been found in Manitoba but that we don’t have many (or any) specimens of. Most of them were “ugly” wind-pollinated sedges, rushes, grasses or exotic, naturalized “weeds.” Others were rare native annuals that don’t germinate every year and can be hard to find. Some were at the edges of their North American ranges and not present in high numbers. Quite a few are aquatic plants (like pondweeds) that grow in lakes, sloughs and rivers. Not a single native orchid though is unrepresented in our collection. In addition to our collection of specimens we also have a slide collection which features mostly pretty plants; there are 300 photographs of orchids but only one slide of goosefoot plant.

So I don’t really need a lot beautiful wildflowers in my collection (unless they are from a part of the province that hasn’t been visited before). What I DO need are the weeds growing by the side of the road, the pondweeds that cling to your leg when you’re going for a swim in the lake and the grass-like plants that grow in damp, muddy areas. But no orchids please, they’re just not ugly enough.