It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandilion

by David Maddox
Sound Science LLC

“It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandilion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”

Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is legendary for his watercolor landscapes, painted near his Buffalo, NY, home.  His paintings are typically about nature: swamps and forests and backyards that include plants and birds and insects and rays of light.  They are full of shapes and living things.  His late period pictures, especially, are intense and even hallucinatory.  There is an exhibit of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York City this summer.

He was also a great journalist and over his lifetime wrote over 10,000 pages in various handmade volumes.  It is there, on 5 May 1963, that he wrote: “It is difficult to take in all the glory of the Dandilion, as it is to take in a mountain, or a thunderstorm.”

And so they ARE difficult to take in, both for their beauty and their complexity.  How can you describe and assess them?  You finally stumble, awestruck, into saying that they are “beautiful” or “majestic” or just “enormous”.  But as scientists and biologists we often have to describe and quantify such entities and then communicate the results in ways that aren’t hopelessly obscure.  That is, we need to communicate a very complicated thing in a simple and, above all, useful way.

Dandilion Seed and the Moon (1961-1965)

I just returned from meeting to open a new project with the Bureau of Land Management. Sound Science is on a team, led by NatureServe, to create “Rapid Ecoregional Assessments” of the Mojave and Central Basin & Range (NV) Ecoregions.  These Ecoregions are vast and complex (the Central Basin covers most of Nevada), but we need to create an assessment — a description of the status of the place and how it is changing — that is broad in scope but shallow in depth.  BLM needs a useful snapshot that will help them know what to do as they manage their lands in the face of development, ecological transformation, and climate change.

A core thing we want to do in such an assessment is “roll up” small-scale measurements to make larger-scale observations and conclusions.  We want to take a collection of observations about species and agents of change (water extraction, exotic species, climate change, renewable energy development…not all agents of change are bad) and make conclusions about multi-dimensional and emergent attributes like “ecological integrity”.  Then BLM can know how to best manage its land for the future.

Words like improvisation and imagination can sound awkward in the context of science.  But these are the very abilities that we need to be able to see past and beyond the details — this species is here, that process is there — to create and understand how a vast and majestic thing works and how it might change.  Perspective is another important word — a sense of what you VALUE in the picture you are creating.  The Dandilion seeds are close up in Burchfield’s picture.  He values them.  The sky is there too.  You need to see the patterns and perspective and not only the details; the beating of the heart and not just the heart’s location in the chest.  How do you “take in” a complicated multidimensional thing like a mountain?  With an act of scientific imagination.

As summer changed to fall, Burchfield felt the same urge to imagination.

“All day on the gateway to September putting in the huge insect tree in the August part. For the first time in weeks I let myself go in improvisation and fantasy.” – Charles Burchfield’s Journals, Gardenville, NY, 9 Sept 1950