The teacher in the biology department I talked to yesterday knows mostly about woody plants, but he gave me the name of another teacher who specializes in herbaceous plants. Next week will be a little crazy with school's opening for students, but I'll try to track him down and see whether he can recognize the photos. As I was talking to the 'woody plant biologist' yesterday, another teacher from the history dept. overheard our conversation about rabbit-tobacco and immediately began to recount the time in his childhood when friends and he had smoked rabbit-tobacco. I said, "Well, at least it has medicinal properties!"

What I'd really like to do at some point is write to Harper Lee and let her know what a lark this has been trying to track down the rabbit-tobacco in Mockingbird. My mother says it used to grow all about Dinwiddie County, Virginia, but she hasn't seen it for years. Wonder why?

An aside: The most recent studies in educational theory are stressing the importance of students finding a personal interest hook into studies to investigate as throughly as possible, building webs between new subject areas, deepening knowledge of areas that are of personal interest, and making as many connections between areas investigated and areas in curriculum. I'll use my own interest in botany to demonstrate to my ninth graders a model for their own investigations of areas from Mockingbird. The possibilities offered by that novel are many and rich. Our final product will be an illustrated Mockingbird lexicon from each of my three ninth grade classes.

At first glance, it might seem that this kind of investigation of rabbit-tobacco trivializes the content of Mockingbird, but actually, in presenting this example to my classes, I'll address:

The descriptive details of the Radley yard: specific details in the weeds Ms. Lee chose to place there (i.e., rabbit-tobacco and the noxious weed Johnson grass);

Open-ended questions of what these two details might suggest about the appearance of a 'swept yard'--and how the reader might visualize such a yard; how community members might react to such a yard, including adults' reactions as opposed to that of children;

How Lee's use of such a yard ties into the repeated themes in the novel: poverty, prejudice, the oppression of the pariah, etc.

In other words, even with the mention of two specific details, such as Johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco, much can be suggested. And I hope this will impress upon my students that in their own writing, specific details will add depth.

The other point of fascination to me is what the reader brings to a work of literature. Perhaps Lee simply used Johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco because that is what she had seen in bleak-looking yards in her own Monroeville--and nothing more. Perhaps she herself used them to suggest a yard with weeds--a yard that lacked tender-loving care and nothing more. And perhaps my own tendency to take connections as far as I can when considering themes in a novel causes me to think of connections Lee never herself considered. Well, that's exciting, I think. I believe readers create novels in their own reading that the writer herself or himself didn't visualize while writing the work because readers bring information into the work that the writer may have not been privy to. And that is very exciting because it makes novels burst with new life. However, this kind of thinking I will probably not touch on with my ninth graders because it is most likely too abstract. I'll share it with you all, however, because we tend to take topics here in so many directions.