Nature details: how do???

[swan_tower]

I have a confession to make: I grew up in suburban Dallas, and I simply Do Not Grok Nature.

On the metric of effort-to-result, putting details about nature into my stories is probably one of the most labor-intensive things I do. And I don't even mean long, rapturous passages of lyrical description about fog creeping over a pond at dawn or something like that; I mean that unless I make a conscious decision to go do some research, my characters walk through forests of Generic Trees, listening to Generic Birds make Generic Noises. When I do the research, it winds up being half an hour of effort for half a sentence of result.

I'm making an effort to improve at this, and having discussed it with some writers, I think a large chunk of what I need is simply better resources for the information, or better ways of finding the resources. Field guides are helpful, but even more helpful are books or websites that talk holistically about a specific landscape, so that I get integrated information like "down by a watercourse you'll see these trees and these birds and these flowers," rather than separated lists of all the trees found in a region, and all the birds, and so forth. I feel like this is relatively findable for the United States, but much harder for other parts of the world, especially non-Anglophone parts. Any recs for such things? I mostly use this for secondary-world purposes rather than this world, but I'd love to be able to have characters ride across grasslands that look more like Mongolia than Nebraska, or cope with environments like tropical jungles that we mostly don't have here. Could be formal field guide-type stuff, or just somebody writing with really evocative specificity about not just the mood of a place, but the specific flora and fauna to be found there and how they behave.

(I know one bit of advice is "get out there in the naturez yourself!," but that would mostly only help me learn to write about the northern California landscape. I do get out in the naturez, but I can't just go hang out in Mongolia whenever I want.)

Comments

[affreca]

Would TV shows like PBS's Nature series be the right level of detail? While there are some that are just one animal, they have some about specific ecosystems. PBS have also recently had shorter series on a specific type of ecosystem - last year was Rivers of Life (Nile, Missouri, and Amazon); this year is islands (Madagascar, Borneo, Hawaii). I understand if that is to basic for what you're looking for.

[swan_tower]

Oooh! I hadn't thought of those, thank you. "Too basic" -- hah! I think you underestimate how basic a level of information I'm looking for. :-)

[sovay]

Could be formal field guide-type stuff, or just somebody writing with really evocative specificity about not just the mood of a place, but the specific flora and fauna to be found there and how they behave.

I'd look for travel writing about/from your target regions. Is Mongolia a theoretical or a relevant example?

[sholio]

Seconding this. This is one of the main ways I research new-to-me landscapes - travel writing and memoirs of growing up in wherever-it-is are both very useful. Back in the pre-plague days, I'd often use the library for this, locating the correct part of the nonfiction stacks by looking up the topic and then perusing the available books.

[green_knight]

Thirded. It's one person's filter, but you're likely to get a plethora of telling detail. Landscapes viewed through the lens of people who love them are sometimes very different from tourists watching mainly from a coach or passing car.


Another great source is Flickr. I have, in fact, planned holidays on Flickr, just typing in my destination and seeing what people thought was notable and should be seen. Again, it's about the personal touch and unique angles.

[swan_tower]

See, Flickr and other sources of picture are find for giving me a visual . . . but in my experience, I very rarely see photos captioned with a list of the plants and animals visible in the shot. And that -- the concrete specifics of what lives there -- is what I'm trying to find, not the general "what does this landscape look like?"

[yhlee]

The other thing Flickr isn't going to give you is how do things smell. For example, I have really vivid memories of how wisteria smells because it has a powerful fragrance and we used to live in a house in Korea with an overgrown wisteria tree. Unfortunately, we never got close to it because it was also the home to some extremely aggressive hornets.

...if you ever want me to talk you through typical Korean plants, I can tell you about it/rec a book on Korean gardens.

[swan_tower]

Yes! One of my few "triumphs" of Putting Teh Naturez In involves a line from In Ashes Lie about how "elder and sweet cicely honeyed the air," because I'd gone to the Vale of the White Horse with somebody who knew all about the plants and could tell me what I was smelling.

[green_knight]

We may be looking for different things.

The distribution of animals and flowers are things I can research otherwise. But it's one thing to know that a place has snakes (and which ones they are) and another to see the shedded skin in a tree; it's one thing to know there are spiders and another to learn how prevalent bright black-and-yellow spots in webs are everywhere you walk or how many of them there can be in a single location. Guides give me 'this area grows flowers commercially' and probably which species they are; Flickr gives me that they're grown in long thin strips, that there are flower-watching bus tours, and that growers seem to live stream flower cams. Research gives me 'there's a local cheese industry' and 'cows are kept indoors'; Flickr gives me 'they make hay in round bales and someone stuck a face on last year's bale'.

[swan_tower]

Right, at the moment this is very much a "what can I do from my computer?" question -- and tends to be in general, since I do the bulk of my writing late at night, when the library isn't open. (Of course I can go during the day/if my online research results in buying a book I have to wait for it to arrive.) "Perusing" answers my question, though, of how to be sure the book will focus on the landscape and not the writer coming to terms with their divorce or something like that . . .

[sholio]

Hmmm, I wonder if travel, memoir, and botanical blogs would provide a similar experience in These Times of Plague. When I'm googling for specific information on something or other of that nature (the name of a flower or a bird I just saw on a walk, for example) it often leads me to personal blogs talking about nature hikes and the like. Parks/tourist/hiking-trail sites might be useful as well, especially since the ones aimed at Western tourists often have an English version.

But I totally get what you're saying about winnowing and the difficulties thereof. FWIW, at least from what I've found, focusing on rural travel and memoirs is helpful for getting more of the kind of thing you're looking for; you want hippie-ish types who talk about the landscape a lot. In other words "my childhood running wild on an island off the coast of Scotland" would be a lot more useful for natural ambiance than "my childhood in Edinburgh."

There's also recent archaeological and historical writing - obviously not without potential colonialist issues and written by outsiders, but ... like, say, I just read a book that gave me a richly vivid picture of the jungles of Honduras through an outsider's eyes (City of the Monkey God), including a lot of specifics about what it smells and sounds like.

[swan_tower]

Theoretical. Travel writing makes sense, though I have to winnow it down to the stuff that actually focuses on the landscape, rather than mostly being about the cities or the writer's inner journey. Any "three easy tips for getting what you want!" advice in that regard is helpful. :-P

[eldriwolf]

older Travel books by hunters, and *Naturalists*..they are interested in Animals, are often out in the country- side on Foot, the best of them are knowledgeable about plants and almost lyrical about land forms...

[yhlee]

...and now you have found out why every time I describe a landscape, it looks more or less like South Korea or Galveston. XD

[swan_tower]

Hah! Hell, I'm shamefully unable to describe North Texas. I can do the general feel of it no problem . . . but apart from bluebonnets, if you ask me to list off native species of the region, I think I'd just blink at you.

[yhlee]

My mother is a dedicated amateur botanist - she's been pointing out plants to me my entire life, and I would pick up plant ID books/field guides/guides to edible plants and so on as a kid. Also, in high school biology, we had to do a project that was basically identify and label 20 species of trees around the school campus. I don't think all of those species were native (I'm pretty sure Seoul Foreign School's one magnolia is some kind of weird-ass import) but it was sure educational!

OTOH, the one area where I am utter ass is architectural terminology, because I never picked it up in English. Among other things, Seoul is like wall to wall high-rises/brutalist architecture, so not much to see (because everything got flattened during the war), and on the occasions my parents discussed architecture it was in...Korean.

[swan_tower]

Whereas I think I do better with architecture, because 1) a class on medieval cathedrals and 2) reading up on changes in English architecture across a period of three centuries. Still a moderately narrow focus, mind you, but it gives me a decent base to work from.

[yhlee]

Yeah, all I got there was 9th grade Western civ talking about the transition from Romanesque architecture to Gothic, and something something flying buttresses. Other than that, I'm at a loss. :p

[swan_tower]

If ya got questions, I might be able to help out! I also know Japanese architecture a little, though not as well.

[watersword]

Damnit, until you said non-U.S., I was going to suggest reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's work, which is gorgeous nature writing, but it's all U.S.

[swan_tower]

I am not averse to U.S. suggestions as well! I only brought that up because U.S. is generally easier to find, but I don't want to confine myself only to modeling this part of the world.

[mindstalk]

It's probably a poor value/effort ratio for your specific purpose, but Peter Wohlleben's _The Hidden Life of Trees_ talks about Central European old-growth forests; could be interesting in its own right with some minor spinoff for you. In particular he talks about the types and growth cycles of trees in a stable forest. Let me check my notes:

* Contra the idea I got from Charles Mann about parklike forests needing human fire to cull undergrowth, he says *real* old growth forests also don't have much undergrowth -- not enough light reaches the lower level. I guess that matches tropical forests too. Also the light that reaches the floor is heavy in green wavelengths, not useful for plants, since the canopy filtered out all the good stuff. Which implies something about what the light looks like, too.

* Beeches are smooth, so in storms water runs down the trunk and carries electricity, you don't see much damage from lightning strikes. Oaks have rough bark, lots of interruption, lots of damage. Maybe this is why they're associated with Zeus and Thor?

* IIRC beeches are the big climax species for where he is. Ideal tree for an ideal central European environment; beech crown catches 97% of light.

* Seasons: young trees leaf earlier and hold on to them longer, trying to get an edge on the older trees around them that otherwise shade them out. (Deciduous, obviously.) Plus it's warmer near the ground, so they can afford to.

* Alder trees are nitrogen-fixers, so they drop their leaves still green; the trees are so rich in nitrogen that they don't need to bother reclaiming the chlorophyll.

* Microclimate (I recall this from a AMNH diorama too): shade and evaporation mean temperatures and humidity can be very different from outside the forest; he said 48 F on a forest floor when it was 98 F outside!

* Forests can pass along water vapor further inland than it would otherwise go, but that requires continuity; if you log the coasts the interior dries up.

* Healthy trees grow straight up, not bent or forked; those shapes indicate something went wrong, and probably also limit lifespan, as a bad weight distribution will come down in a bad storm.

* I don't have notes, but dim memory says willows grow along rivers -- Old Man Willow! -- and don't expect to live long, because of a high chance of getting washed out at some point. I remember a fair bit of discussion of the effect of "once in a century" events on trees in general, but have no notes.

So I thought to check the Hobbit, remembering beeches, and Tolkien loooooved trees:

About four days from the enchanted stream they came to a part where most of the trees were beeches. They were at first inclined to be cheered by the change, for here there was no undergrowth and the shadow was not so deep. There was a greenish light about them, and in places they could see some distance to either side of the path. Yet the light only showed them endless lines of straight grey trunks like the pillars of some huge twilight hall.

:O No undergrowth, greenish light...

[green_knight]

No beech forest I've ever been in had pure green light. Their leaves don't decompose as quickly as others, so you always get a brownish/golden light reflected. This is slightly skewed by modern experience: an industrial increase in acidity amplifies that effect. Add deer to nibble all new growth (they're ferocious, but hunters like them) and you get a forest of trees... and not much else. (The difference between one side of a deerproof fence and the other can be very dramatic).

Source: growing up in Germany with lots of beech forests, lots of deer, and a fair amount of acid rain, which I've also researched.

[swan_tower]

Well, but that sounds very interesting in its own right! Thank you.

[mindstalk]

Not sure how useful this is but another fun fact from _The Secret Life of Trees_ (different book, different author): the tree-like lifestyle of outgrowing your competition on a tall stack of lignin has convergently evolved several times. But only once have 'true trees' with "secondary growth" -- the growth ring that makes the trunk wider and wider -- evolved. So the palm trees that I'm sure you're familiar with, fellow Californian, are tall and thin because they're not true trees -- they somehow achieve their final width early on, then grow up and up, but not out. Might help visualizing 'exotic' forests with lots of palms or other "trees".

I *think* this is right: branches don't move up as a tree grows. If a tree has a high crown and no lower branches, with a smooth trunk, it's because all the older and lower branches fell off and the scars got healed over.

I'm pretty sure this is useless, but the original flowering plant was probably a true tree. So all those woodless wildflowers and dandelions and grasses are basically ex-trees that lost the mechanism of secondary growth. Within that non-tree flowering group are the monocots, which then re-evolved a tree-like lifestyle 5 different times (one of which is the palm trees.)

[daidoji_gisei]

grasslands that look more like Mongolia than Nebraska

Weirdly, this triggered a strong defensive reaction in me. Probably because I have met few people who know what Nebraska actually looks like. (It’s not really totally flat. That would be North Dakota, which still hasn’t recovered from getting repeatedly run over by Ice Ages.)

I have the orthogonal problem of having trouble describing a city that doesn’t look like a contemporary Midwestern/Great Plains city. I’ve been slowly collecting resources, but at times I feel like I’m just compiling the ways I am unimaginative.

[swan_tower]

Hah, sorry! Child of the (lower) Great Plains here -- I grew up in Dallas -- and I've driven through the Midwest more than once. Including the Llano Estacado, which very nearly is totally flat. Yeah, the Kansas/Nebraska area tends to have a gentle undulation that I find really pretty when it's covered in prairie grasses blowing in the wind.

Interesting on the city thing! I think that writing the Onyx Court books meant my brain got stamped pretty hard with central London. I'm not sure I've yet written anything in a city that looks like Dallas. (Then again, I write relatively little set in modern cities anyway.)

[mindstalk]

For last, I would suggest Google Street View, if you haven't already. You can (with much cursing) 'walk' around different cities. Things to look for are very narrow streets (they look like alleys to us) in Japanese cities, or random shops in the middle of 'residential' blocks in La Serena Chile (because zoning is a lot less segregationist than in the US), or multiple grocery stores around train stations in Sydney (Google Maps might be more useful than Street View)

I'll nominate where I lived in Osaka for 3 months, where the streets are 1 lane wide, yards are nearly non-existent, blocks are short along at least one dimension, and population density is probably high (but not crowded) even with two story buildings. https://www.google.com/maps/place/2-ch%C5%8Dme-24-27+Tenn%C5%8Djich%C5%8Dkita,+Abeno-ku,+Osaka,+545-0001,+Japan/@34.6449179,135.5207099,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x6000dde1822305c5:0x4c0dcf83c887a6e5!8m2!3d34.6449179!4d135.522904

Also note the profound lack of car parking by US standards.

What Street View wouldn't tell you is how many bicycles there are; one source says Osaka has 25% mode share by bicycle, and my experience was getting passed by like 6 bikes a minute as regular experience. No helmets. It's basically Dutch biking, except along fast roads bikes just use the sidewalk rather than having protected bike paths.

(Per a recent paper, crowding is defined as people per room. Japanese houses or rooms are often small by US standards, and people per km2, high, but they're not jamming lots of people into a bedroom any more than we are.)

[mrissa]

Kathleen Jamie

[swan_tower]

Woot, not a U.S. focus! Thank you.

[jreynoldsward]

For Mongolia, watching some Mongolian heavy metal videos can be useful. I recommend Hanggai as they have a big chunk of videos shot on the land. One particular one--Xiger Xiger--shows horses and horse herds, as well as some landscape.

The other thing is to read not just travel writing but nature writing. Good nature writing doesn't just superficially describe the landscape details but gets into the flow and poetry of the world--the emotions the landscape evokes. Robin Wall Kemmerer, as mentioned above, but also Mary Austin, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ed Abbey, and others (yes, Abbey has problematic points of view--multiple--but when it comes to describing landscape and drawing the reader in, he's also damned good). Also look at LeGuin and see how she portrays landscape.

It's not just about the details but the emotions that the land evokes in someone living on it. Steinbeck is another writer who portrays those emotions well.

[swan_tower]

The broad visuals, I got; it's the species specifics I lack. So while Hanggai's videos are very pretty (heeee, somebody else who knows Hanggai!), until such time as somebody glosses them with the name of the flower that bobbed in the wind as the camera zoomed past, they're not going to get me the information I'm looking for.

Thanks for the writer recs! I just wish I could find more people writing (in English) about places not in the U.S.

[sholio]

Hanggai fan! *fistbump* I ran across their videos a while back while, yes, researching Mongolia (I was actually looking for movies/TV, found out they don't have much of a movie industry, but they do have a thriving music industry) and those were my favorites - they have such a cool, interesting vibe, sort of heavy metal by way of westerns and ZZ Top

[yhlee]

I realize this is hard due to COVID-19 (although it might be possible to do in a socially distanced way because outdoors) but are there any botanical gardens in your area? I ask because when I lived in Pasadena, we would go to the Huntington Gardens, and they would have different sections with plants all labeled and suchlike, and you could go over the course of the year and watch the plants change and smell them. The Huntington specifically had a Chinese garden section, plus a bonsai collection. It strikes me that that could be one way to research plants/biomes that are normally not local to you.

[yhlee]

Oh hey, their website talks about their themed gardens, so websites of botanical gardens might also be a useful resource.

[swan_tower]

Woot! I never even thought of that, thank you!

[swan_tower]

San Francisco has a lovely one! That is an excellent thought for . . . later.

[eldriwolf]

Nature writing:

Stephen Bodio,
(Mostly USA,Mongolia).
(*Falconry*!!, with Eagles,sight-hounds)

Gerald Durrell,(silly, catching animals around the world)

Gavin Maxwell,(people of the reeds)(and Scotland)

Jim Corbett, (India)

Alfred Russel Wallace
(The Malay Archipelago)

[sbrackett]

I thought maybe local natural history museums would be good so I googled natural history museum Mongolia and came up with a website that only showed up on the wayback machine and the wikipedia page indicates it was torn down at somepoint in 2019? I tried clicking on something that looked like it said "geography" but in something that looked like Cyrillic and that link failed to take me anywhere useful.

But...maybe natural history sites in general?

[jazzlet]

Local natural history societies, and species recording sites/apps would also be worth checking out. While they may not be in English they will be recording species in Latin anyway so it shouldn't matter. And it would also be worth asking local natural history societies what you want to know, enthusiasts love it when others are interested in their passion, and they may well be able to translate some thing they already have for you.