Ask a Local

– Amy Hackney Blackwell

When we were hiking Mt. Pelion, this plant was everywhere:

It has long, stiff, green stems that look sort of like very thick pine needles, but it’s no pine, The tips of the stems are pointy, putting this plant into the category of prickly Greek plants that will scratch you on the trail, but not dramatically or dangerously so – you can brush past them with relative impunity, especially after facing the Sleeping Beauty forests of dangling blackberry brambles that are everywhere this time of year. The stems are maybe a foot long. The plants themselves range from three to 8 feet tall.

And they are everywhere. Anyone making a catalog of common Greek plants should include the things.

But. Identifying a plant when it’s not in flower can be difficult. I’ve never had much luck with dichotomous keys – they seem to work best when you already know the answers to the key questions. My favorite plant ID technique is to type a description of the plant into a search engine and see what images come up, but that wasn’t working in this case. Even describing the stupid thing was defying me. It was getting embarrassing – I mean, I’m supposed to be a plant scientist.

But I am not without ingenuity and tricks of the trade. I’ve studied the history of peripatetic botanists who catalogued the world despite encountering lots of plants they’d never seen. They had the same handicap I did – encountering plants that didn’t grow where they grew up. And one of the best tricks of old-school botanists was – Ask a local!

In one way, this technique might have been easier for Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on their journeys with Captain James Cook in the South Seas, or for Joseph Lord or Mark Catesby in their travels through Carolina.

Theophrastus specifically sent his ancient grad students out to ask the locals of Epirus what they called their native flora. Those botanists and the locals all knew the landscape in a way that we moderns mostly don’t. They actually saw the plants around them, which is more than you can say for many people today.

On the other hand, they had definite linguistic limitations – no one in the parts they visited had made a special effort to learn English to please tourists – and they lacked my favorite botany tool – my iPhone.

After a week of getting to know this spiky, scratchy plant in a very up-close-and-personal sense on Mt Pelion – my arms and legs have the thin scratches to prove it – I finally showed a photo of the thing to the proprietress of our favorite taverna in Milies. She didn’t know what it was, so she took me across the street to show Yia-Yia. Yia-Yia said to ask Costas, who was cleaning the kitchen. Costas looked at the photo, zoomed in, nodded, and announced “Sparta!”

A word to work with! I typed “Sparta plant Greece” into my phone’s search engine, and there it was: Spartium junceum, Spanish broom.

It’s native to the Mediterranean region. Fabaceae. The green stems are the plant’s main source of photosynthesis. It drops its leaves early, and it makes bright yellow flowers in late spring and summer. In late summer it produces seed pods, which would make it obviously a bean plant - but those pods weren’t much in evidence in mid-September. (I did eventually find some when I knew to look for them.)

If you look for pictures of this plant, you’ll see it covered with yellow flowers. Not what it looks (or feels) like this time of year.

Joseph Lord in 17th century Charleston had to send his specimens to England along with questions about their identify and wait months, if not years, to get answers. Solander hauled back boxes and boxes of dried plant specimens that then sat in Europe for centuries (lots of them are still in London), which Hans Sloane himself catalogued.

I bet they would’ve killed to have a device that could snap an image of a plant that they could then show around as they traveled.