Wild Flowers of Eastern Canada is on the bookshelf after all

I am loathe to throw things away. Once you do that, it seems a use for the forsaken article eventually or, what's worse, immediately crops up.

And I am even worse with books. Periodically I cull the shelves and send two or three to a garage sale, then usually end up returning home with them.  Why wouldn't anyone want a 2004 Tourism Guide to Saskatchewan? It's a mystery.

As I related in my last post, I am making a path in our meadow and have had the opportunity to get up close and personal with a variety of anonymous wildflowers. Well, unnamed they are no longer.

Friend John suggested I should look up the names of the plants and lo and behold, almost hidden on the book shelf between Pierre Berton's Cats I Have Loved and Known and Loved and Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers ( both fine cottage reading) was what I was looking for: Wild Flowers of Eastern Canada.

Yes, I did pack a field guide after all - and not just any field guide, but one made even more beautiful by the watercolours (executed by Katherine Mackenzie), which adorn its pages.

 

 

And only $2.95! 

 

 

 

 

Apparently it was published by Tundra Books in 1973 and purchased by my mother for us in 1977. As I recall, we were living on the military base at Downsview at the time, and there was a large field behind the house.

 

The standing orders seem to have allowed for a fair growth of "weeds," as a photo of our daughter as a toddler, sitting surrounded by dandelions, attests. And at that time, Gran and Granty gave us this little book "to enjoy the many wonderful things in the great outdoors."

  

 



It seems to have become son Tony's acquisition given his initial in masking tape on the front cover and his name in his four-year-old handwriting:

Today I leafed through it and found a whole page devoted to just what I saw yesterday: buttercups, red clover, clustered bellflower  and cow vetch (aka bugle weed?), which apparently tastes like honey (and bovines love it).

 

It is a small volume, I can easily tuck into my pocket long with my camera. But it is more than a handy reference for wild flowers. It recalls to mind a time 40 years ago when the children were still small and at home in what must have seemed like an enormous world bounded by trees, a field, and the houses of little friends now long forgotten.  What happened to the other Robbie, to Tony's friend Cass, to little Alison, the same age as Joanna.

 

And their grandparents, so much a part of our lives at that time:  my dad deceased for almost 25 year and my mum now almost 95 and settling in to life in a nursing home.

 

They're all called to mind while I am leafing through this book and its watercolour reproductions of 100 wild flowers in "90 full color plates."