Becoming one with nature

Class gives plant lovers the tools to discover new species

By JOEY HOLLEMAN - jholleman@thestate.com

They each wore hats — wide-brimmed straw hats, floppy canvas hats, ball caps. None of the headgear was a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, but the five women most certainly were detectives.

Susan Creed of Columbia examined the small plant and called out the clues to her partners in their Master Naturalist class.

“Small plant with berries. Pause. White flowers. Pause. Four petals. Pause. Trumpet shape. Pause. Leaf is smooth. Pause. Flower is fuzzy, sort of hairy.”

Susan Siegel of Elgin, Anne Quigley of Lugoff and Hilda Flamholtz of Columbia thumbed through guidebooks, searching for the identity of this mystery wildflower blooming along a trail at Congaree National Park.

They searched and searched and searched some more. “I don’t think it’s in Porcher,” one detective said.

“I don’t know how to use this book apparently,” another said.

Meanwhile, Diane Curlee stood by, only a little smug that she knew the name of the plant without the clues. One important lesson in the Master Naturalist course is learning how to identify plants and animals using guidebooks, so she let her teammates work it out.

Eventually, after the others gave up on finding the plant in the books, Curlee told them it was partridgeberry. They quickly found it in books under its scientific name — Mitchella repens.

They all scribbled down the information in small notebooks, another plant added to their growing knowledge base.

The five women and their other classmates spent the first half of their weekly field trip identifying plants. Netted chain fern. Doghobble. Ironwood. Cinnamon fern. Swamp chestnut oak.

Every step they took presented something new. New common names. New scientific names. New physical attributes.

“It’s information overload,” said Sandra Pherigo of Columbia. “But I’ve always wanted to know what all of these things are, what their names are.”

When the 12-week course offered through Clemson Cooperative Extension is finished, she might not know the name of every plant and animal in the forest, but she’ll know where to look for the answers.

The new Master Naturalist program is first cousin to Clemson’s wildly popular Master Gardener program. The classes pack intense learning into three months, and the students are required to turn around and teach others.

The Master Gardener program began in 1981, and thousands of its graduates conduct gardening classes throughout the state. The Master Naturalist program began in 1999. Classes had been offered only in the Beaufort area until last fall, when four new sites were added, including Sandhill Research and Education Center in Northeast Richland.

“The layperson is getting more and more disconnected to nature, but some people are looking for ways to connect,” said Austin Jenkins, who teaches the Sandhill class.

“So many of them have watched Rudy (Mancke’s public television show “NatureScene”), and he is so amazing to them. What we’re going to learn is how he learned all that stuff.”

The $500 class fee isn’t cheap, but it covers a collection of guidebooks on spiders, birds, reptiles, amphibians, trees and wildflowers found in South Carolina. Classroom time is minimal. Most of the studying is done at home, allowing the students to spend more time on Friday field trips like the one to Congaree National Park in early May.

The class is time-consuming. Many, but not all, of the students are retirees. Flamholtz used 12 vacation days from her job at a bank to make the class trips.

“I just love being in the outdoors,” said Flamholtz, as she munched on a sandwich during a break on the edge of the park’s Weston Lake. “I look at this (class) like a little during-work sabbatical.”

Others view the class as a way to do their jobs better.

“I stay right on the fringe of this sort of information with my job,” said Mark Talbert, a Clemson Extension agent in Fairfield County. “But I go out in the woods with friends or with Scout groups, and I realize how much I don’t know.

“I don’t want to be an expert. I just want to have a working knowledge.”

Curlee is the education director for the Orangeburg County Conservation District, which helps explain how she knew most of the wildflowers without opening Richard Porcher’s “A Guide to Wildflowers in South Carolina.”

“I know plants,” Curlee said. “But there’s always a niche where you don’t fit. I don’t know birds.”

As the group of 16 current or former students hiked behind Jenkins to Weston Lake, they stopped frequently to listen for bird calls. They heard and spotted a northern perula and a prothonotary warbler and caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a Swainson’s warbler.

As they admired one of the largest loblolly pine trees in the country, Jenkins talked about forest ecology. This huge tree likely got its start after a hurricane or wind storm cleared a gap in the forest canopy, letting in the volume of sunlight needed for pines to thrive. (He hinted a question on canopy gap might be on the course’s final exam.)

The lessons kept going during the lunch break, as broadhead and five-lined skinks skittered past on the rails of the lake overlook and yellow-bellied sliders cavorted in the water below.

Nobody seemed to care that Jenkins kept teaching while they ate. They have so much to learn, and they don’t get enough time in the woods with Jenkins.

“The first day (of the class) I knew I would love it,” Quigley said. “I’ve never been out in the woods with so many people who love it as much as I do.”

Reach Holleman at (803) 771-8366.

REGISTRATION INFO

The next Master Naturalist class offered at Clemson Sandhill will be in the fall.

Classes: 9 a.m.-3 p.m. on Fridays, Sept. 12-Nov. 21

Registration: Available soon at www.clemson.edu/masternaturalist or (803) 788-5700, ext. 32.