Thrill of Discovery

During my career as an amateur botanist (I make my living as a botanist too, but the amateur part is way more fun) I have hit more than my share of jackpots, and I would venture to bet that the excitement and satisfaction every time has equaled that of any prospector who has ever found some big fat gold nugget after years of poking around in gravel beds. My fattest nuggets have mostly been in the form of unknown or overlooked “new” species, or occasionally “lost” species that were thought to be extinct, or more often some particular unique offbeat form maybe known to me from only a single collection 100 years ago, which holds some obscure piece to an evolutionary jigsaw puzzle I’ve been obsessed with. All such discoveries, when met with at last in living color, have an intrinsic, captivating beauty of their own, as does that gold nugget fresh out of the stream. But the nugget has value beyond its beauty—it can be converted into cash which can be used for any number of future delights. Exactly so with a plant discovery—or insect, or reptile, or mushroom—whatever you are interested in. It has values far beyond its intrinsic charms (indeed, to my mind such things outshine gold in both kinds of value). To me, the real value of such long-sought prizes are in all the clues they contain that can help lead you forward in your quest to reconstruct the great jigsaw puzzle of life—or the part of it that includes the family tree of your plant and its kin. Discovering these long-lost key pieces is only the beginning; the rest is like an extended Christmas, opening one eagerly-awaited present after another—or more accurately, one more clue after another in the Big Treasure Hunt. What do the seeds look like? Do they resemble those of relative A or B or neither? And then how long do they take to germinate? What do the cotyledons look like? Hmmm. Very interesting. And then—wow, the first leaf is trifoliate! That is definitely something new. Are they all going to do that?... And on and on, layer upon layer, the deeper you go, the more you find. Way more satisfying than a spree at the Mall--not many frontiers there. [Segue to essay on Frontiers]. 

And as long as all those pieces of the great puzzle go on living, somewhere out there in the real world, other new pioneers just like you can always go back and look at the thing from some perspective you missed and learn even more…  And when they see it afresh they will get the same goosebumps as you got….