On the Naming of Specimens: Field Notes from the Threshold
- Blair Butterfield
- Aug 2
- 2 min read
Field Report 001
Location: Between the garden gate and the past
Date: Midsummer, 2025
There is a moment—right before collecting a plant, a feather, a forgotten tool—when the air thickens. When the object isn’t quite dead, but no longer alive in the way we understand it. It hums with a faint echo, waiting to be remembered.
The Department of Botanical Memory was born here, in that hum.
We do not claim to preserve science. We preserve scent trails, fragments of dreams, ritual debris, and the soft refusal of the earth to forget. Each specimen is not merely a thing—it is a signal, a relic, a threshold.
In these Field Reports, you will find:
Artifacts mislabeled as products
Photographs mistaken for memory
Plants that smell like the ancestors you almost forgot
Words trying to remember their original root systems
Some objects arrive with stories attached. Others require excavation—through time, shadow, lineage. This work is not about proving anything. It is about listening for what still vibrates in the dust.
We begin here, with hands stained by soil and the first recovered entry:
DBM-027
Object: Baobab Seed Pod
Botanical Name: Adansonia digitata
Collected: Miami, Florida
Known Uses: Rich in vitamin C and antioxidants. The dried pulp is used medicinally and in food preparation; seeds yield nutrient-dense oil. Revered as a sacred tree across numerous African cosmologies—often called the Tree of Life.
Classification Tags: Botanical Archive, Diasporic Memory, Recovered Ritual Object
Annotation: Often mistaken for a gourd, this seed pod carries the whole sky inside it.
In pre-colonial field lore, baobab pods were believed to fall only after they had finished listening. The rattle inside is not the sound of seeds—but the unsettled names of those taken too soon.
In 2015, the Department received this pod unmarked, accompanied by a handwritten note:
“I carried the original seed through customs in a pocket, like a lung.This is the first of new fruits”
It is still being tested for sonic residue.
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