Plants of the Chesapeake Bay
Buttonbush. Hercules' club. Panic grass. Tearthumb. Beach spurge. Sea rocket. Ladies' tresses. These are but a few of the wild and wonderful plants found in Plants of the Chesapeake Bay, a quick-reference guide to plants found near the Bay. The guide’s vivid text and photographs make the wide array of plants along the Bay’s waters, marshes, and shorelines easy to identify and wondrous to behold. Its compact, portable design encourages naturalists, local residents, boaters, researchers, and the curious-minded alike to throw the guide in their pack and explore the botanical bounty of the Chesapeake Bay.
Co-author Lytton John Musselman is a self-described white-haired botany professor often mistaken for Steven Spielberg who still revels in taking university students into forests, marshes, lakes, and deserts to study plants. He will present his work in this lecture. “My job is to read Nature in the language in which it is written,” he says. “That is, to understand plants in the field and convey that knowledge.”
Musselman is the Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Botany and manager of the Blackwater Ecologic Preserve at Old Dominion University. He is author of A Dictionary of Bible Plants and Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran. He also works for Prairie Home Companion as a botanist on cruises with longtime friend Garrison Keillor.
Fee: $15 members, $20 general public
