Stonington woman writes wildflower book
STONINGTON -- You might be nearer to God in a garden than anyplace else on Earth, but that doesn't mean you can't find traces of the divine on the gritty edges of a country lane.
Perhaps surprisingly, it's taken a retired mathematician to show us the way. Farmer's wife Sue Robinson, who taught math for 20 years at Taylorville Junior High School, has put her thoughts and observations into a book called "Roadside Wild Flowers of Christian County."
She also just happens to be a strikingly good artist, and the book's 148 glossy pages are illustrated with her watercolors depicting the plants in exacting detail. Being a mathematician, she's even taken a knife to some specimens to slice them open to better understand the methodology of their construction and constantly comes away an admirer of their maker's handiwork.
"I think God is partially a mathematician," she said with a smile, seated in her farmhouse kitchen in the sticks near Stonington. She talks of things such as "Fibonacci" numbers and sequences, precise mathematical patterns that show up again and again in nature, from seashells to flowers, their designs put together like someone was following a pretty detailed blueprint.
That great human number cruncher, Albert Einstein, often thought he saw the fingerprints of an architect in the symmetries of the universe. He said: "There are two ways to live your life: One is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle." Count fellow number cruncher Robinson in the miracle camp. "There's beauty everywhere," she says of her wayside flowers.
She first began noticing them while running to get away from the consequences of conquering her addictions. A committed smoker who quit twice to have her kids but then always drifted back to smoking, she finally stubbed the habit for good 25 years ago and took up running to ward off the demons of post-nicotine weight gain.
"It's a little boring out there sometimes," she says, recalling the loneliness of the long-distance jogger. "And I would start noticing and counting how many different wildflowers I found. You see more when you are going slow enough and close enough to look."
With her genetic makeup wired for painting as well as figuring, she soon began illustrating what she saw and, with a growing sense of curiosity, sought out the plant names and a little of their history. It all makes for fascinating reading in the book, which organizes its 65 plant entries by color to make looking them up faster and easier.
Sample this from page 118 for the plant known as "blue flag" or Iris shrevei: "Iris was the goddess of the rainbow and so the many colors of Iris blossoms led to the name," Robinson writes. "Louis VII of France used the Iris in his coat of arms. The design is known as the fleur-de-lys."
Or this from page 114 on spiderwort, a plant with bright blue flowers that rejoices in the Latin name Tradescantia ohiensis. "It was named after John Tradescant, King Charles's gardener, who once planted a garden in which you could tell time by which flowers were blooming."
On and on it goes, for page after alluring page. She mentions the medicinal properties of many of the plants that, once growing everywhere, are now often confined to the colorful fringes of the vast corn and bean sameness we plant to harness nature to our hungry will. Even her husband, Bruce, whose ancestors have been breaking the prairie sod since the 1840s, has become a believer in the worth of wild flowers.
"I take the herbal supplement echinacea if I start getting a cold, because it will shorten it," he says. He then explains echinacea comes from the purple coneflower, echinacea purpurea, and is used to boost the immune system.
Bruce Robinson says attitudes have changed to plants once seen by farmers as little more than a nuisance. He points out, for instance, that wild grassy waterways by the edge of farm fields have been found to act as "filter strips," stopping a lot of runoff chemicals from getting into the water supply.
"I've learned you've got to have a balance," he says, talking of making room for wildness at the edges of his land. "You can't have a happy Mother Nature without giving something to Mother Nature."
His wife's gift to us is her book, a volume calculated to please both the reader and the grand mathematician she senses behind it all. "God gave us the wildflowers to enjoy, and then I think he gave me a little bit of talent and drew my attention to them," she says.
"I believe I was supposed to make this book."