The thrill of discovery

I have seen this shrub around for years. 

It reminded me of gooseberry, but it was not thorny, and I never saw it with berries of any sort, goose or otherwise. I finally caught it blooming, which is the best time to try to identify it. I took a picture and hoped fervently that it would be in the wildflower picture book. I hoped against reason, since the shrubs that make it into the wildflower picture book are few and far between. Nevertheless, I prayed to no one in particular, “Oh please, please, don’t make me key it out in Swink and Wilhelm.”

I have a love/hate relationship with taxonomic keys. I first encountered a taxonomic key in Plants of the Pacific Northwest when I took Plant Evolution in college, where I chose as my project keying out X number of plant species. It was hard, but one of my better decisions as an undergraduate. You don’t get very far before you encounter hard words like “glabrous” and “pubescent.” And you have to go to the glossary (for “smooth” and “hairy,” respectively). I learned a lot of plant families, and it got faster as I learned the vocabulary. Still, it is daunting.

The picture book let me down. Nothing in the yellow flowers that remotely resembled it. I had to get out Swink and Wilhelm, Plants of the Chicago Region. And sure enough, I was only to the second page before it wanted to know if the leaves had stipules. The trouble with getting old is that there are many, many times when you know that you once knew something that you cannot remember any more. Thus it was with stipules, although I had a vague mental picture of structures around where the petiole attached to the stem (the actual definition: “an appendage or bract situated at either side of a leaf axil”). The trouble was that I couldn't tell from the picture.

At the time it was not only raining, but dark. A few days later, I had time to walk out and collect a specimen. No stipules. I pressed on. The tubular structure of the flower made me think it might be a heath (Ericaceae), but I ended up with “Ribes in Saxifragaceae.” The leaves seemed saxifrage-like. How do I know this stuff? As it turned out, gooseberries are in Saxifragaceae, so good for me for getting that close by the seat of my pants.

One might think that nothing is drier reading than a dichotomous key. There are, however, almost always moments of discovery that validate that you are on the right track and send a thrill down your spine, things that you would never have noticed if not directed to look for them. In this case it was “Leaves yellow-dotted beneath with resinous glands (use a hand lens).”

I turned the leaf over. “I’ll be damned,” I said out loud. There were yellow dots! My hand lens was not where I thought I left it, so I borrowed Terry’s. There they were, glistening yellow drops on the underside of the leaf. It was Ribes americanum Mill., wild black currant. Even Swink and Wilhelm, whom I think of as stodgy taxonomy types, waxed poetic in a way I’d never seen anywhere else in their book: “The student is encouraged to view, particularly on the lower leaf surfaces, the gorgeous, golden globular, glistening, glittering glands.”

Here they are.

Zoom in if you have to--there are glistening yellow dots on the underside of this leaf.

The berries are edible. I’ll have to see if I can pay attention long enough to beat the birds to them.