Brewster Gardens, Plymouth, Mass.: Entry 4
Monday, July 11, 2022 5:04 PM
For my Wonder Blog Mini-Project, I created a field guide of plants and trees in Brewster Gardens. It is different from other field guides in that it not only includes species common to the area, but species that tend to catch one’s eye. Included in the guide are the variable watermilfoil and the giant butterbur, both of which have captured my interest since my first visit to the site. This field guide is quite representative of the history of this park, in that there is a mixture of native and non-native species. The park, which was overgrown and swamp-like at the time of its creation, has been carefully cultivated by Plymouth citizens. This human development may account for some of the non-native species found in the Gardens.
The creation of the field guide pushed me to use more thorough observation of the species I focused on. Many plant and tree species look very similar, so identification requires nuance and precise observation. I noticed more and more details as I narrowed down my genus and specie. I had not done a lot of specie identification in the past, so it was a rewarding process to identify the organisms I saw in front of me.
References
INaturalist. iNaturalist. (2022). Retrieved July 12, 2022, from https://www.inaturalist.org/
projects, C. to W. (2018, June 30). Acer rubrum. Wikimedia Commons. Retrieved July 12, 2022, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Acer_rubrum