Introduction

Hi! I’m Lissa Kramer. I’m a continuing education student in the Ethnobotany (EBOT) Occupational Endorsement Certificate program, so taking this as a core class.

I’ve always had an intimate relationship with plants. I grew up gardening, hunting, and foraging in rural Minnesota. Some of my favorite memories are gathering wild asparagus and helping my family make maple syrup. Early in my working life, I taught plant identification and uses as a guide in Southeast Alaska. In grad school, I was fortunate to get to work on a project entering plants into what was a new database at the time, the Consortium of Pacific Herbaria. Later, as a national park curator in Skagway, Alaska, I took care of a small herbarium of previously catalogued plants. I’m now working at a national park in Seattle that unfortunately has no natural resource specimens in its museum collections, so I find other ways to stay engaged with plants in my personal life. I share a community garden plot, forage for wild edibles and medicinals near our cabin in the North Cascades, and volunteer as a rare plant monitor. I think this class can help me better converse with the other rare plant people, many of whom are retired botanists and other types of scientists. I’m increasingly interested in ecology, looking at the intersection of plants, subsistence, and sustainability.

I’m including a picture of my new camera lens and my rare plant assignment from this last weekend’s backcountry exploits in the Okanagan.