The forces of life are vibrant within plants .... Life moves most gracefully in the gestures of trees -- resilient, responsive, unafraid. It dances and sparkles in the caress of sunlight and wind on twinkling leaves.

Today I helped Lynn with her final ninth grade biology project, known to families whose kids have come up through the Susquehanna system as "Leaves Redux." In fourth grade she had to collect and label about a dozen different leaf specimens -- the poster still hangs in our garage. In ninth grade, where the course is called "botany," she has to collect and label, with popular and scientific names, at least fifty different specimens from deciduous trees. In the fall, when she took the zoology component, she had to sight and identify 100 species of birds, a project which lent itself to widespread "fudging."

"Fudging," of course, is the polite term for "cheating," saying you saw a bird when all you saw was its picture on a web site. Ron supervises the science projects around here, and I am assured that Lynn's "fudge" rate was very low, (less than 5%), especially when compared with the efforts of others. In some cases, it was Ron who actually saw the bird, not Lynn, and we justified that by saying that the birds do not know that they should visit our feeder on their migration journeys only outside school hours.

The leaf project is harder to "fudge" because you have to have an actual example of the leaf. It is difficult to recycle an older sibling's or friend's project because the leaf deteriorates in the process of mounting it, and anyway, the instructor marks it by using a decorative hole punch or drawing on it with a special pencil.

We are fortunate that two nearby sites are devoted to showcasing native plants, so not only are there many different specimens, they are labeled with the terminology Lynn needs. Today we visited two places: the campus of Harrisburg Area Community College, where a former president who was an avocational arborist oversaw the installation and labeling of many interesting plantings, and the park at Fort Hunter, a nineteenth century farm preserved as an historic site where the plantings are conveniently labeled.

At Fort Hunter we had to stay clear of a wedding party which was using the mansion there as a reception site and having a lot of pictures taken on the grounds. There we collected, among other specimens, leaves from the common pawpaw (asimina triloba) the kwanzan cherry (prunus serrulata) and the shadblow (amelanchier candensis).

The shadblow rained thousands of tiny insects down upon us as we moved the lowest branch to capture the specimen. One of our problems was that many of the trees at Fort Hunter are more than a century old, dating from the time the plantation was established. Some have been pruned and some naturally do not maintain low branches, so that there were varieties on our list that we could have used but that we could not reach since the living branches were more than twenty feet up and the dropped leaves were unsuitable.

We're sure that another tree would have been suitable, except that it grows like a weeping willow only a hundred times more dense. The branches overhung with thick leaves made something like a tent, and when we moved them aside to try to see the label, it was like rolling a stone away from a cave, and neither of us was willing to crawl in under the foliage to find the sign. By this time both of us were experiencing increased allergy symptoms (runny nose and eyes), rampant this season because of the kind of weather we've had.

At HACC we discovered that most of the labeled specimens were ground covers or conifers, which Lynn can't use for her project. We did get the scarlet oak (quercus coccinea), the red oak (quercus rubra), and witch hazel (hamamelis intermedia) which looks like a low shrub but was on the official list. By the time we were finished I had begun to notice how stripped the lower branches of so many of the trees were, and I wondered about the ecological wisdom of sending more than a hundred youngsters (in Lynn's school alone) out to wrestle examples of nature away from their proper environment.

I've been using "we" throughout this piece, and it really was a team effort, both of us walking the park and the campus, Lynn collecting and bagging the specimen and me writing down the name and sometimes providing a crude drawing in case there was confusion later. I lamented the fact that Latin is not offered at Lynn's school. I had four years of it in high school (as well as the background sounds of the pre-Vatican II Catholic liturgy which seeped into my DNA) and would have been able to remember without a drawing that the prunus serrulata had a toothy edge like a "serrated" knife and that the quercus coccinea was more brilliant  than the quercus rubra, which was merely a dull red.

Lynn is remarkably self-reliant when it comes to getting her school work done, and she never lets a project go so long that there are tears and compromises and an all-nighter for parent and kid, as I've heard sometimes occurs in other households. In this case she really did need someone to transport her to places beyond our neighborhood (which has a lot of good examples but not nearly enough), and it was convenient to have a scribe along, cutting the time spent in half.

We did encounter some other parent/kid pairs. But I couldn't help noticing that there were a number of lone adults out and about, some of whom I recognized as parents from school functions, clipboard and specimen bags in hand, doing the work without the student along. I think this errs on two counts. Not only is the parent doing the work for the kid, he or she is missing an opportunity for some real quality time with a youngster who is growing up and away all too fast.