35 years, we enthusiastically exchanged views about our name (she's
"Kellie" and glad she's not "Kelli"). It made me think how natural
are the human impulses to both want to belong and want to
differentiate ourselves.
There's no one I know in my family who's like me, who would have
relished making the field sketch which recently morphed into
"Taurus/Rosa nutkana." Or is there?
On my father's side, traces of his immigrant family are lost three
generations back in the mists of rural Ireland -- though surprisingly
this strain produced some fine engineers, with a gene that must have
passed me by. My mother's history offers more fertile ground for
investigation, with a clan that goes back to 18th century South
Carolina. One side is distinctly rural, based at a centuries-old red
earth cotton farm which finally went bankrupt just before the Great
Depression -- but not before "my daddy's farm," as my mother called
it, gave her the first impressionable ten years of her life. The other
side of the family was always urban Charlestonian -- small business
owners, some would-be musicians, several crackerjack administrators,
and a few notable eccentrics.
And it's here, at the convergence of urban and eccentric, that I looked way back and connected with "someone who I'm like" -- my many-times-great-grandfather, John Linnaeus Edward Whitridge Shecut(1770-1836).
JLEW, as my great-aunt's archives abbreviate, was a doctor, inventor, small entrepreneur, novelist, co-founder of the Charleston Philosophical Society, and the first person to catalog the flora of the American Carolinas in Flora Carolinaeensis, a book that can be found on Amazon.com, along with his very bad novel inspired by The Last of the Mohicans. His botanical studies, including the one shown here, are housed in the Charleston Public Library.
My mother's arts were almost exclusively social, and she claimed to see only one colour -- her favourite, green. Yet she would exclaim about sights like the pattern of sunlight on a tree branch or the way new buds unfolded; things sometimes reminiscent of her early years, like the grape arbour on "my daddy's farm."
It's tempting to see a family history in what captures the eye like this assortment of leaves that I enjoyed packing onto one page -- but what's the thread, nature or nurture?
