Timestamp: 40th of Summer, 508 AV
Drae Sommers’ basic herbalism class was thorough. Kavala had other classes but this one was heavy in nomenclature, utilized the student’s ability to draw, and had them learning heavily about botany as well as they gained herbalism knowledge. Drae drilled into them over and over again that they needed good fundamentals before they could move on and have solid skillsets in medicine. She didn’t care where each person was in class, she constantly drilled them to make sure they perfectly understood her teaching. And that meant that notes had to be copiously made, meticulously labeled, and the students had to know their stuff. Quizzes were not unheard of and often their tests were unannounced. For all that, Kavala liked Drae. She always gave the ENTIRE picture of what they were trying to learn, not just little slices of the puzzle that never equated to a whole pie.
So, it wasn’t a big shock to Kavala to find herself out in the gardens, a large sketch pad and a box of pencils and colored inks sitting beside her. She wanted to master the concept of drawing, and plants were fortunately easy enough to do. Luckily they were just lines and simple strokes that could be shaded with greens or blacks or whites. With a fresh journal in her laps and colored inks sitting beside her, Kavala was tracing careful lines on paper with a quill and adding delicate lables to them. The drawing was slowly taking shape with Kavala’s careful attention to it. It wouldn’t be her first of the afternoon… but it would set the bar to her journal that would set the pace of her herbalism studies for the whole of her life.
She started from the top down, labeling carefully the stems leaves and buds. Nodes got marked and then she decided a entirely new diagram of leaf parts would be needed. She got blades and petioles done. Then she labeled the entire system the shoot system. Then she went on to label the lateral roots, primary root and then the entire root system. When she was done, Kavala sat back and admired her work. She had two more diagrams to do... one was specific leaf parts and one was specific flower parts.
Drae was making them learn the parts of plants because in order to be proper herbalists, they had to know which parts of plants were good to use as medicines and which parts were useless or even harmful. If one didn’t know stems from leaves from roots – which should have been obvious but weren’t in all plants – then there was no point in taking the training further. Once they learned plant parts, they’d move on to types of plants and then individual herb identifications. There was a lot of information to fill a young Konti’s head with… but it was something she had to learn… whether she wanted to or not.
Kavala sighed, stood up and stretched, then gathered a few leaves and laid them out as models so she could begin drawing all over again.
She dipped into the black and outlined a leaf coming from a stem, making notes as she drew in the veins. Kavala wiped the tip, dipped into green, and began to ink in the inside of the leaf in color, dragging it through the still wet black to get a darker shade of green around the edges. She then wiped the quill again, dipped it in white, and added pale spots to the leaves to give it highlights. One more wipe and she was back in the black drawing in the veins. When she was done, Kavala paused, blew on the journal, and re-dipped the black and began labeling.
She sat back, groaned, and then stretched. Kavala carefully filled the rest of her journal with notes on leaf structure to go along with the notes on plant structure she had already added. When she was done Kavala knew she’d have a very nice identification book if she kept working… but the work was tedious and one of the things she didn’t understand about work on Mura. Among her people, the Drykas, everything was taught orally. Nothing was handed down in books. Books didn’t survive on the Grasslands. But here, if she wanted the marks she had to follow protocol, and her class was lonely. She longed for the moments she could split from her study work and turn back to the cove where she’d been camping in, sharing evenings and lessons with Matthew.
Sighing, she stood up and paced the garden once. She gathered leaves as she did so. The Konti had a pile of various sized leaves with her, different shapes, sizes, and margin types. Once she thought she had one of each kind, she left a pile sitting around her on the bench she had taken over and once more picked up her inks. The leaves, one by one were divided into categories then carefully sketched and labeled. She went back over them with color, making some of them interesting colors just to relieve the gross tediousness of the task.
When she was all done, Kavala had them all divided up into five categories. The categories were veins, shapes, arrangements, edges, and arrangements on the stems. Kavala ran her fingers through her hair leaving streaks of color in the translucent strands. She frowned down at the work, then began adding notes from the lecture to the journal entry. The writing went on forever. Her hand cramped, her eyes practically crossed, and she looked downright cranky. When she could take no more of it, she packed up her inks and notes, blew on the journal page until it was dry and slammed it shut. Her teeth were practically grinding in frustration.
”This all seems so useless. I know we need to know what plants look like to be able to harvest correctly and do proper herbalism, but can’t they just show us the exact plants we need? Why do we need to know the difference between toothed edged leaves and lobe edged leaves” Kavala said into the thin air, wondering even to herself whom exactly she was talking too. The young Konti was willful, restless, and wasn’t used to long hours in the classroom or bent over a journal taking meticulous notes. She slammed her journal closed, then re-opened it again, scanning over some of the paragraphs she’d written.
Flowering plants and herbs are split into two types. The first type is a monocot. Monocots have one single seed leaf called a cotyledon that emerges from the seed. The second type of herb is called a dicot. This type has two seed leaves or cotyledons that emerge from the seed. A good example of a monocot is a grass while beans are great examples of dicots. Leaf veins and floral parts also differ in monocots and dicots. Monocots have veins that form parallel patterns that move from the base to the top. Dicots have leaf veins that form a net-like pattern. Monocots have floral parts in multiple of three while dicots have floral parts in multiples of four or five.
Kavala groaned. Drae was her friend, but the classwork was so dull. It was incredibly dull. Anything else in the world pretty much held more of an appeal to her than this dreadfully dull material. She rose, brushed off her rear from where she sat on the dusty bench, and wondered if it wasn’t time for a run before hitting the books again.
Before the night was done she had to get through leaf arrangement, leaf shape, and simple or compound leaves. Dicotomy keys were brutal and dull. Kavala decided getting her nails yanked out by the roots would probably be less painful.
Count: 1304
