300th Blog - Botanical field trips

Supposedly the first 300 blogs are the hardest, so the 301st should be easy. Just returned from a field trip associated with the Botanical Society of America's annual meeting, and it had a familiar qualities: a bus load of plant fanatics ranging from senior citizens to undergraduate students, generic food box lunches (How is it that they are all identical?), and someone who has the responsibility for getting us back on time. Now if ever botanists surrender to the clock, our professionalism is toast, and no use setting some precident of being on time. No when some little fern requires that a group bushwack through a mucky sphagnum bog, green briar, and poison ivy, why no problem. How fun to hear students tell us that this is their first national botanical meeting. If you tell them you still remember yours, which was in 1972, they look at you in rather disbelief that anything so ancient might still have functional gray cells. Sorry not to include any pictures, but no way to get them out of the camera and into this hotel computer. Sorry not to have a better story to celebrate 300 blogs over the past 2.5 years. This is not a torrid pace, and seldom is there time for more than one internet session a day; too many real things to do. Like visit beach communities and some strange holly forests with lots of ferns and fungi, and lots of plants that we associate with more southerly ranges (holly, mountain laurel, and so on). Now to wash off the dust, get a drink, attend a lecture on evolution and a mixer of several hundred botanists, some of the best people on Earth. What! You don't believe me? Well, just ask them!