Years ago, I lived in southern Missouri, on the ancient, weathered-down, pink granite hills of the St. Francois Mountains. In my extended family were some serious campers and fly fishermen, with well-prepared gear and routines. Southern Missouri is rich with white water rivers, and we explored them all.

At Silver Mines, a campground along an abandoned mine on the St. Francois River, after a day of swimming and fishing and riding tubes on the white-water shut-ins, we would trudge back, exhausted, to our campsite for dinner, the fly fishers filleting their bass and bluegill, the kitchen crew heating up a kettle of lard, and grilling corn and potatoes on the fire.

After chores, adults played double solitaire while the kids played catch. I, the very pregnant one, sat with my huge hardbound plant identification book, Steyermark’s “Flora of Missouri,” trying to learn how to key out the plants I’d gathered. The white-flowering plant that lay before me had square stems and a big open-mouthed flower like a mint. When I read in the key, “Flowers ‘obediently’ stay in place if rotated on the raceme,” I pushed the flower to the side to see. It stayed in place. I had successfully followed a most difficult maze of dichotomous questions and may have yelled out in joy, but it was long ago, and I don’t remember.

However, the joy I felt at keying out Physostegia virginiana, the obedience or false dragonhead plant remains. This spring, I happened upon a local nursery in Fairlee on its opening day and bought a carful of native perennials to replace a brambly hillside at my house which sits atop some very ancient Vermont calcareous schists. There, among the lupines and columbines sat an obedience plant, white, and very obedient — I had to test it a couple of times. My little piece of madeleine in which the memory of that camping trip came flooding back — the taste of corn meal and fish fillets, the St. Francois River, my eight-pound Steyermark and a picnic table of wildflowers.

Last year I planted a couple of spice bushes, but they both died. Recently, while pulling out a few of the companion plants (weeds) in my front garden, I saw that the spicebush roots had stayed alive, and were now sprouting. I immediately called my son, that same boy who was one month away from being born when I keyed my first plant, who in his middle-aged wisdom, has become a dendrologist, gathering tree and shrub seeds everywhere he goes and growing them around the yard. After so many years of being a bird biologist, he realized that plants don’t fly away or require getting up at 4 a.m.

Spicebush, Lindera benzoin, in the laurel family, is spicy and aromatic. With sweet-smelling yellow flowers and high-fat red berries, they are a gift to pollinators and berry eaters, and are host plants to the spicebush butterfly and the Prometheus moth. Dying back to the roots and hanging on to sprout another day is not uncommon with shrubs, who use the “dying” to reset.

I do love plants and have this habit of just going out looking. I was paddleboarding on my favorite pond recently and realized there was a bottlebrush-looking plant underwater that I had never noticed before. Wading down in the muck, I gathered one and keyed it out to Utricularia intermedia, the carnivorous intermediate bladderwort. Bladderworts are highly evolved — photosynthesizing and flowering and digesting animal prey, all without roots, stems, or leaves. This aquatic plant has developed a bladder system that expels water, then waits for a tiny water flea or nematode or mosquito larvae, or even a tiny fish to touch a trigger hair. In an instant, the bladder refills, sucking in prey— and there is lunch. It is capable of digesting bit by bit if the prey is too large. They produce a beautiful orchid-like flower, which I’ve never seen. I might need to start camping out on the paddleboard, just waiting. There’s no need for a weighty Steyermark anymore. I can use iNaturalist on my phone now.

I recently read Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book,” The Orchid Thief,” which tells the story of an obsessive orchid collector who leads a group of Seminoles into the Florida Everglades National Park to steal rare ghost orchids, mistakenly assuming that indigenous people can take rare plants from national parks. It goes very badly. Orlean’s research leads her to interview some obsessive collectors. They recall getting their first orchid or bromeliad or palm and thinking it was pretty. But invariably, that one plant led to hundreds, then to needing to have every species, even if the pursuit destroyed their finances, their marriage, their lives.

Fortunately, my love of plants is tame — the yard planted in native flower gardens and lots of hiking into the woods to see plants where they grew up and where they belong. If I start taking trips to the Western Himalayas to see the rare Utricularia Furcellata, or head off to the tropics to see bladderworts that can digest frogs, please send help.

Micki Colbeck is a naturalist and writer and chair of the Strafford Conservation Commission. Write to her at mjcolbeck@gmail.com