What Should We Be Worried About?

CLOSE OBSERVATION AND DESCRIPTION

URSULA MARTIN

Professor of computer science, Queen Mary, University of London

Take a potato from a bag of potatoes. Look at it closely. Yes, that’s right, you really have to do this exercise. Now put it back with the other potatoes, mix them up, and see if you can find it again. Easy? Now try this with oranges. Still easy? Now recruit a friend, and describe, draw, or even photograph the potato in enough detail for them to pick it out. Or the orange.

There is a weed with a pink flower growing in my flower border, and something very similar, with a yellow flower, growing in the wall. These are fumitory (Fumaria officinalis) and corydalis (Pseudofumaria lutea), wildflowers of the poppy family, and yes, the field guide tells me that the former is commonly found in cultivated ground and the latter in limestone walls. To identify exactly which of the twelve or so U.K. fumitories I am holding in my hand requires me to consider the precise descriptive language of botany and count and measure inflorescences, peduncules, and sepals. The field guide helpfully provides hand-drawn colored illustrations, black-and-white diagrams of flower parts, and a backwards look-up key (“If the inflorescence is shorter than the peduncle and… then it is a…”) to supplement the textual descriptions.

Once upon a time, such observation, description, and illustration were the bread and butter of professional and amateur scientists. My eight-volume flora, on heavy paper with lovely illustrations that are now collector’s items, was well thumbed by the original owner, a 19th-century lady of leisure. It claims to be written for the “unscientific,” but the content differs from a modern flora only by the inclusion of quantities of folklore, anecdotes, and literary references.

Darwin’s books and letters are full of careful descriptions. The amateur struggling with a field guide may take comfort in reading how he frets over the difference between a stem with two leaves and a leaf with two leaflets. Darwin seems to have had a soft spot for fumitories, giving wonderfully detailed descriptions of the different varieties, whether and under what conditions they attracted insects and how the geometry and flexibility of the different parts of the flower affected how pollen was carried off by visiting bees. He was looking for mechanisms that ensured evolutionary variability by making it likely that bees would occasionally transfer pollen from one flower to another, giving rise to occasional crosses—analysis later reflected in the Origin of Species.

Shakespeare and his audiences not only knew their weeds, they knew their habitats, too, and the difference between arable land and permanent pasture. In Henry V, we hear how wartime neglect has changed the countryside so that arable land left fallow has been taken over by darnel, hemlock, and fumitory, and in the unmown meadows, “hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs” have replaced cowslip, burnet, and clover. Gardeners everywhere will sympathize.

Google can give a happy hour or so tracking down references to fumitory: Online data sources allow the capture and analysis of images, sightings, and geographic and other data in a way never before possible, informing the creation and testing of broader scientific hypotheses. But the analysis is only as good as the input provided—citizen science projects founder if the citizens are unable to do more than record a “pink flower” and a blurred mobile-phone image. No amount of image analysis or data mining can yet take the place of the attention and precision practiced by Darwin and thousands of other professional and amateur naturalists and ecologists.

So let’s hear it for observation and description. Fumitory and corydalis may be for the advanced class. Start with the potato.