ABOUT ME

I studied abroad in London for three months for my first semester of college. At this time, I was not yet familiar enough with my Sony to use it, so I was still taking photos exclusively on my smartphone. About a week before I left for the U.K. I impulse bought a book in my local bookstore: Wildflowers in Britain by Geoffrey Grigson. I came up with the idea that I'd go hunting for the flowers and photograph them with their pages in the book. This project attracted the attention of various people along the way. First, an elderly man in the airport saw me reading the book before my flight. He told me he remembered when it had come out (it was published in the 1940's), that it was a very important book, and that he was glad to see it again. I didn't think much of this at the time, but later (via Tumblr of all places) I learned that that book is part of a series of short books on things unique to Britain that were published during World War II. The books were made to be easily hidden (they were all thin and small - I kept mine in my daily-use hand bag) because they were meant to preserve British cultural heritage in the case that the Nazis succeeded. I did not find this out until more than a year after the study abroad trip. During the trip, the book project attracted several other people's attention. My roommate helped me track down the plants and marveled at my ability to remember what each of the flowers looked like well enough to recognize them in the wild and stop to get the book out. She also got to witness me jump out of bed and run around the side of the university with my phone camera because I realized a "weed" we had been passing on the sidewalk for weeks was actually common mallow, and I hadn't recognized it because the flowers in the book weren't in color. One day I stopped along a fence line on the way towards Camden from Regent's Park to photograph a plant growing at the edge. A man walking on the sidewalk stopped to ask me what I was doing, so I explained the book project to him, and he spent a bit looking at the book with me. He thanked me for sharing it,  said he was happy he happened upon me that day, and that he would pay more attention to wildflowers from now on. My professor was also incredibly enthusiastic about the project and a later addition to it where I compared local flowers to architectural features. His class actually had a photo journal as an assignment, and that's what I used for mine. He kept my project and showed it to his wife, who saw me in his office the next semester and excitedly said, "Oh is this the flower girl?"