Veridis, Verbum pro verbo

Karl Seckinger

Karl "Trout Whisperer" Seckinger is an outdoor enthusiast and resides in northeastern Minnesota.

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Veridis, Verbum pro verbo

Posted by: Karl Seckinger Updated: June 5, 2012 - 1:39 PM

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(Green, word for word) If I wished you a happy “nodding beggartick”, would you know that the statement makes no sense to rub you the wrong way with that stems frond? How about that I get a real kick out of “cormus racemosa”, is the Latin, for a plant commonly known as grey dogwood. I chuckle at the dog/race irony. You ever watch a grey hound race, those tongues wag and the pooches are thirsty but they don’t want any red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea). Albeit now since I’m feeling thirsty well Sambucus Canadensis is not an aged Canadian wine, it’s just good old fashioned elderberry, that you can vintage, if harvesting the fruit, whence in season. Maybe after a nice glass of wine you want to freshen your breath, but be careful you don’t mix up the Mimulus glabratus (monkey plant)with the mentha arvensis ( field mint) which can at times, look a wee bit similar. Could you spy with your eye, without plucking a sensitive (onoclea sensibilis) fern, or sniff out a cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea) out of an olfactory line up? Well in our northern wilds and wetland woods if you learn the difference, you could cool someone off with a marsh fern and even show off by anointing them with a regal wreath of jewelweed, if they didn’t mind the, touch me knot. Feeling under the weather as it were, well then don’t rush, but lay down around some (Panax trifolius) Dwarf Ginseng, and maybe you’ll feel a sedge better. Once you’re up on your feet again it’s much easier to paddle past, than pronounce polygonum lapathifolium, but when you do, if you suddenly feel more intelligent it’s perhaps because you now know the plant as, smartweed. Ever had the earth alongside a brook trout stream trip you up over tussock sedge, why it’s very name, carex stricta, implies, pay attention when walking. Kalamia polifolia, rolls of the tongue and sounds as lovely as the pink hues in its blossom’s only to leave me laughing at the joke on the, swamp laurels, name. Now we all at times hike over, around or through most of these mighty common summer greens so why not know some of their nomenclature, and if you put on your scutellaria galericulata (skull cap) and don’t go confusing your hardhack with your meadowsweet or get your Acer rubrum in a bundle, because that could just make you turn into a bristly aster you’ll really be seeing your veridis, leaf for leaf. The trout whisperer