After a week of working in Elysian Park, Armen found an affordable room nearby. A couple weeks later, on his way home from work, Armen noticed a familiar shrub. It was just like that shrub he’d seen the night he arrived in Eden. He pulled a twig off of it and took it back to his room. The next day, he identified the shrub. It was a New Zealand tea tree. “Maybe that explains the accent,” he said to himself. He began to collect specimens of other plants, recording the places where he found them on maps that he drew out as he went.
It would have been characteristic of Armen to go to the library and consult maps and other reference documents, to get a satellite’s eye view, so to speak, but for once Armen did not want to see things from above. If any maps were going to be involved, he would draw them himself, from his own experience. If he lost his way in the process, so be it. He didn’t wish to travel on a diagram; he wanted to travel by his own feet, his own eyes, and his own brain. He wanted to have his head in the game, so he put the ready-made maps aside.
Armen wasn’t interested in ready-made taxonomies either. He did sometimes go to the library to identify some of the plants he’d encountered, but more often than not, he was content to identify plants on his own terms. It wasn’t as though he was about to share his data with anyone.
Armen developed an increasing appreciation for the great botanical variety all around him. It seemed nothing short of a miracle that all these plants from around the world had gathered like refugees under the nurturing sun and sprinklers of Eden.