Lone Star Foray the First

I traveled to Texas over the weekend; deep into Texas, to Junction on I-10 and the Llano River. Driving for a long time and only crossing a small chunk of the map reminded me of a few things about the Lone Star State:

1. It is a big state.


2. I have no good sense about the diversity of the state. As an adult, before this weekend I'd flown into Houston for the weekend (my brother's college graduation), spent two days in Fort Worth at an Economic Botany conference, and driven across the panhandle as quickly as possible last July. I have no real sense of coastal Texas, or East Texas, or West Texas or the Hill Country or Big Bend or . . . but I now know what pastures covered in mesquite look like in the spring.


3. Much as I might mock the flag-waving statriotism of many Texans, that Lone Star flag is a good flag: simple, bold and unsullied with text.


4. I was at a TORCH workshop, by the way. Should you want to know the state of biodiversity collections digitization, a topic even this plant ethnoecologist finds a bit obscure (but frighteningly fascinating) ask about the conversation among curators, taxonomists and bioinformaticians and the Texas Oklahoma Regional Curators of Herbaria workshop.