Book Review

Wildflowers of the Coastal Plain: A Field Guide.
By Ray Neyland. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 2009. 352 pages, 535 color photographs,
65 line drawings, 1 map. $34.95 cloth.

As a kindergartener, I developed a real skill at gently tugging the stamen from a honeysuckle flower and letting the pinhead droplet of nectar fall on my tongue. Nowadays my fingers are too big to do it. Or I tug too hard, breaking the flower in half. In truth, I haven’t exactly tried to “eat” a honeysuckle flower in many years, but I have had a chance to sample a cold scoop of honeysuckle sorbet from Crook’s Corner in Carrboro, North Carolina. Thanks to Ray Neyland’s field guide, Wildflowers of the Coastal Plain, I now know that the Japanese honeysuckle from the playground fence is native to Asia and has a fancy Latin name: Lonicera japonica.

When I got older, and needed money for important things like Skittles and Dr Pepper, I organized a plant sale in our front yard on Second Street in Gulfport. I rifled through my mother’s supply of Tupperware, punched holes in the bottoms of a few canisters with a nail, and potted half a dozen or so purple hairy spiderwort (an herb!) and lazy daisy (grazed by deer and cattle!), and sold them to the neighbors. How many white shirts did I ruin with all that juicy spiderwort? I just couldn’t resist picking a fistful for the jar on the kitchen table. They seemed to pop up, overnight, and just as amazingly, multiply by the dozen before lunchtime.

Now I’m all grown up, and just last weekend I sat with my six-month-old daughter, Lucy, in a clump of white clover (Trifolium repens) in the front yard and searched for the lucky four-leaf varieties. Though we didn’t find any, we did tie long chains from the flowers. Lucy grabbed handfuls of clover and tried to eat them while I thought about how it would only be a few years until I could show her how to get the nectar from honeysuckle.

Maybe it sounds silly, but Mr. Neyland’s book, while an excellent guide full of vivid color photographs and descriptions and glossaries, took me back. Now I know a bit more about those old flowers from my childhood, but more important, I will be able to show them, and many more, to Lucy with hope that she loves them as much as I do.

Sally Cassady Lyon