We drove for about two hours and pulled off at a bend in the highway. An overpass covered a culvert that directed the river under the road. Thick vegetation lined the steep slopes on either side of us. It was a single lane highway, highly trafficked and cutting across a river valley. We parked on a shoulder near a small river inlet leading into what I would later learn, after comparing satellite images to saved coordinates, was a forest remnant. A strip of jungle now wedged between two large pastures, preserving the remains of what used to be a larger, interconnected organism. It was Saturday.
Ten meters into the forest the road noise was nearly inaudible, sound absorbed and reflected by the dense curtain of shrubs and vines. This was a known locale of Anthurium brenesii, a site my travel companion and guide Jason had visited a few years prior, re-populating the forest edge with wild-collected seed, now seedlings. We stopped to snap a picture with one of his plant children, a proud dad looking upon the thriving seedlings once briefly in his care, returned to their home and happily growing.
We were about an hour north of San José, wedged between two national parks. Elevation, I only recently internalized, was extremely important - this site was at about 525 meters, appropriate for the several Monstera and Anthurium species growing among the ecologically rich forest remnant now abutting human activity in every direction.
I could hear a work crew before I saw them. Chainsaws and chopping tools hummed and clanked in the distance, working the sloped edge of the road as cleared ground turned to forest. They felled two trees during our hour-long stop, clearing more land for cattle, or development, or both. The river bed was also visibly trampled by cattle, plants bent and smooshed into the earth, cow patties left behind for unsuspecting gringos to step on.
Still, the site was teeming with life, rich with what we came to see in situ. Pendant Anthurium, primarily members of sect. Porphyrochitonium as well as sect. Pachyneurium. As we walked up the river we found Anthurium protensum, A. loratum, A. brenesii, at least three species of Monstera, and several more Philodendron and Syngonium - I mention plants from the family Araceae as that is what I am most familiar with, but the multitude of represented plant families shouldn't be understated by my own lack of identification ability. The forest remnant was absolutely crowded with a multitude of species of ferns, non-aroid lianas, trees and herbaceous shrubs.
There were more signs of life, too. Butterflies, of course, were common, as well as other, louder, insects and chirping birds. After ascending about 30 meters up the river bank we were greeted with evidence of seed dispersal - perhaps the reward for a steep climb up the side of a muddy canopied slope, holding roots and testing shoots jutting from the wet clay before committing to a handhold. A mature Anthurium brenesii sat in the crook of a tree, low and convenient for photography, one leaf blade covered in sticky seed recently separated from its berry by a bird. The endocarp was still wet, and more seeds littered the ground below.
It is one thing to see plants in habitat, growing on top of other plants; it is another thing entirely to see their role in the surrounding biome in real time. I giggled a bit, taken with wonder and discovery, like ten-year-old me finally got to see something they had been waiting decades for. I was in a jungle, observing plants in context. "This is so fucking cool."
We emerged from the forest to find ourselves back in a cow pasture, realizing that the forest began, or the pasture ended, only where it was too steep for cattle to safely graze. That is where the tree line began. Or ended. Or was buzzed to. An aerial view helps bring the reality into focus. Standing in the middle of the river bank, the forest seemed endless. From overhead, it is a mere remnant, segregated from its neighbors by large, open grazing land. The disconnection interrupts the movement of species, the ability for pollinators to reach the plants they associate with, and the rest of the food chain's ability to operate. We were in the middle of a disrupted supply chain; the edge of a scab on the living skin of this place.
If I could reach back in time and tell ten-year-old me that 30 years later I would be trudging through a riverbed in a tropical rainforest examining plants fully in the moment I would have been ecstatic. But the realities of the moment tarnish the glamour. Jungles are humid, Costa Rican jungles are angled. Every step is not just a step forward, but a step up. It didn't take long for me to realize that navigating mossy boulders and fallen trees turns a simple walk into an exhausting, full-body negotiation. Getting to a site was often simply tolerating a long drive with a friend; actually finding what we came to see was much more demanding.
Between a greenhouse and a forest
I want to back up a bit, because just a few days before standing in that riverbed I was standing in my greenhouse in West Georgia. While both places share genera and color scales, the distance between them is not measured in miles. There is a persistent notion I held for most of my life that a botanist simply walks into a forest and there the plants are. Or, even more simply, that the walk into the forest isn't even considered; that the plants simply manifest on an herbarium plate, or on a greenhouse bench.
We are so used to things coming to us that it is almost natural to disregard the realities of going to a thing when that thing isn't connected to a supply chain. Layered between the screen transmitting the pixels that make up the herbarium plate, or the greenhouse giving shelter and resources to a growing Anthurium wendlingeri, is a plane ride, a passport line, a security checkpoint with an explanation of camera lenses and laptops, a long drive over hopefully-sturdy mountain roads, slow steep hikes, sometimes locked gates, bridgeless rivers, and tolerance for an environment that sometimes doesn't seem to want you there, that will not adjust itself for your presence.
Most importantly though, for me, it required a friend who knows the terrain, knows the locales, knows the landscape, and perhaps most importantly, knows the language and the people. My brief introduction to field botany wasn't just about understanding where and how to find specific species, but navigating the entire chain of necessary events between my potting bench and a moss-covered tree at 1,100 meters. At least here, in this place, observing plants in habitat wasn't just about knowing where to go, but knowing who to talk to, who to build relationships with, and how to say thank you.
Jason is my friend first, a distinction I want on the record, leading the long list of the many hats he wore on this trip: host, guide, driver, translator, teacher, advisor, and the guy who knew the best places to eat, and how to greet people depending on where we were. I would have never guessed it involved whistling distinctly, by the way, as we drove by pedestrians. A whistle to say hello. It worked well.
There is no version of this trip without him, and that is the first lesson of fieldwork I took home with me: it runs on relationships. The plants grow where they grow, and between you and them sits someone else's road, pasture, locked gate, or permission. I did not walk into these places, I was let in.
On our first full morning I sat on the steps of Jason's patio, feet from an expansive, wild garden that was permitted to curate itself. I negotiated with a skittish puppy while two older dogs supervised my behavior. We ate breakfast at a small café, where everything was simple and fresh and correct. I asked Jason what the average wage was, what an appropriate tip looked like; two decades in the service industry demands proper representation among my people. His answer sat quietly with me for the rest of the trip. It resurfaced every time we passed a cattle-cleared hillside or stand of non-native banana trees, growing where forest once stood.
People here were not villains and the land cleared for their use was not representative of some great crime - they were doing the same math we all do, figuring out how to survive and make a life, and their math happened to have cattle in it. There is an obvious trap in wanting to wax eloquent or stern about the sorrows of so much beautiful, endlessly interesting primary forest being cleared across much of the tropics for cattle, for palm oil and avocados and bananas. It gets summed up in numbers and reports that every conservation-oriented nonprofit or white paper or research proposal inevitably ends up referencing. And it is real. I saw firsthand out the window of a Hilux and a Cessna 208B the many thousands of hectares of cleared land that was mostly just... grass, or neatly-aligned rows of non-native oil palms, likely Elaeis guineensis.
It's an honest urge to grieve the loss - I know the importance of these forests and I have spent a good portion of my life appreciating them. They are what I traveled for. But that grievance abuts the loss also outside my own front door as well. My home sits on land that less than two centuries ago would have been dotted with clearings managed by the Muscogee Nation for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, using controlled burns to open forests, letting the river open agricultural floodplains.1 The scenario - primary forest adjacent to recently-cleared and managed agricultural land - also existed at one time where I live now. Witnessing the evidence of a vanishing rainforest wasn't seeing a new kind of wound, it was evidence of a much older tradition, a sense of what it will become informed by my experience living its future and seeing its trajectory. It's a matter of misaligned temporality more than anything else; a slow motion catastrophe with its outcome being what I live in every day.
And perhaps that's at the heart of the feeling of walking out of a rainforest and into a pasture. Alarm bells ring. When will this pasture be a Wal-Mart? The formerly managed floodplains of my region don't exist anymore - not because nature reclaimed the land, but because of what we call progress. We have paved over them so I can get to work and get groceries and do the things that humans do when living in a society.
I don't notice it at home because I can't walk out of my front door and into a primary forest. The consequential problem and forceful reorientation of my mental framing is that Costa Rica made it impossible to look away from. It's easy to ignore the loss at home - I am not presented with the evidence every day as a regular matter of life. It is more complex than the calls to 'worry about your own backyard' - we should be able to be concerned for both at once. But it is also more complex than simply saying the land clearance is happening, or has happened, in both places.
In my hometown, the cattle grazing counterpart is already the Wal-Mart parking lot, the drive-thru window, the traffic light on the way to the next traffic light. At least the cattle prairies we trudged through in Costa Rica were still green, the edges of the land obviously maintained as a matter of necessity, not preference, to keep the forest from reclaiming them. Here, in the US, we have otherwise mostly removed the forest's ability to reclaim. The fight is over.
Across the Divide
We left the café and drove up, up more, and up again, crossing the continental divide, leaving Jason's town - a small surfing village on the Pacific coast - and intending to get to the Caribbean side. We crossed over 3,300 meters at the highest part of the drive, passing pilgrims on their way to Cartago - La Romería. The forest fell away in parts into páramo, a treeless heath, cooler, bright.
More pilgrims turned into steady ribbons of people on the highway shoulder, all moving in the same direction, to the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in Cartago, to visit La Negrita. This was purely coincidental, by the way - neither of us planned this trip to coincide with a cultural lesson in religious adherence and dedication. I missed the lesson at first, unaware of just how resonant it would become in a few short hours. Sometimes, you walk a long way and a hard path to get to church. I am not religious, but I do appreciate the concept of providence.
Once on the Caribbean side Jason introduced me to fieldwork quite bluntly. We stopped on a roadside well past Parque Nacional Tapantí, heading for known populations of Anthurium wendlingeri and Anthurium tayuticense. We parked and walked past a construction crew working on road and drainage repair. The scene wasn't unfamiliar to me; it looked like any narrow mountainside road that I have driven through in the American Appalachians, just a little steeper and a little more... jungle-y.
Everything changed about ten meters into the woods. The road noise faded behind a screen of trees and lianas, while the sound of rushing water grew louder from a river down the slope, marking the start of a week where my shoes would stay wet. There was no quick lesson on what we were doing or how we were doing it, which as a hands-on learner I appreciated.
Into the river basin we walked. We tramped upstream, ankles-to-knees deep in water at times, half a kilometer through boulders and thin passages, contorting through rock gaps and under fallen trees. Jason looked back periodically to make sure that I wasn't falling behind. It was a frustrating courtesy for him I am sure, a seasoned field botanist and hiker dragging along a guy who thought he was prepared for this trip but clearly was not.
The payoff was immense. A population of Anthurium wendlingeri dotted tree crooks and clung to moss clumps around us. On the way out, we stopped under several large specimens of Anthurium spectabile. Each one was photographed with a phone to capture GPS coordinates, contemporaneous notes recorded via voice to text, and closer context captured with a DSLR. 'Save it for later' was the mantra; an actual botanist (or verbose writer, ahem) might have use for the data.
We love naming things
We slept near Turrialba that evening, a place that lends its name to Anthurium turrialbense Engl. - a synonym of the accepted Anthurium bakeri Hook.f.2 The naming convention of using a toponym is common, though often overlooked. Names ending in -ense or -ensis are derived not from a Victorian botanist's legacy but from a named place. I didn't really understand this until we passed a giant sign in a small town on the way to the next stop - "Tayutic".
Oh. Like Anthurium tayuticense. Right.
It is a long list - Anthurium orosiense for Orosi, Anthurium bratsiense for Bratsi, Anthurium sixaolense for the town Sixaola. These names are not just botanical nomenclature made for finding species on Tropicos, but a record of place and time. They reflect our desire to ground ourselves in what we value. Sometimes, the names outlive the forest they were named after. Anthurium jicoteense is not just an inferential descriptor, it is a vessel that carries the remnants of a forest cleared for cattle ranching. One type specimen, one known collection.3
The convention extends well outside botany; it is a deeply human tradition. We just love naming things. My home abuts Weracoba Creek, for instance - a word said to mean "big water" in Muscogee4, which runs through Lakebottom Park minutes from my door. Notably, it is a park that was only ever a lake because the creek was at one time dammed, and hasn't been a lake in a century.
The same impulse that urges home builders to adorn cookie-cutter subdivisions with names like "Sweetwater," "Sandy Hills" and "Weracoba" gives us Anthurium hacumense. Anthurium hacumense was described from material collected along Río Hacum near Buenos Aires, Costa Rica; the type collection records the river as "Río Hacum (Platanar)."5 The river remains, but much of the lower-watershed landscape associated with the type locality has been converted to pasture, plantations, and fragments of forest. The species name preserves a vanished version of the place. Two places, describing versions of places that no longer exist. We love naming things.
Names aren't all places - perhaps not even most of them. More often they are legacies of people. Anthurium turrialbense is perhaps the morbid example worth naming again - now known as Anthurium bakeri Hook.f. - replacing a toponym with a deep, if ambiguous, history for a name honoring a now-dead Englishman, given by another now-dead Englishman.
Perhaps one of the most exciting observations on our trip, in a forest full of them, was Anthurium brenesii, named for Alberto Brenes, perhaps Costa Rica's most storied botanist. Not a Victorian-era explorer or wealthy English science-adventurer, but a native, a Tico, doing quieter work in the place he grew up. Crucially, it was a name bestowed out of respect by Dr. Tom Croat and R.A. Baker (not the dead English Baker), rather than claimed by Brenes himself.
the climb, by elevation
The unforgiving reality of fieldwork
Friday morning, I thought I was going to die in a cattle pasture on the side of a mountain.
That sounds far more dramatic than the reality. We woke up in Turrialba and our host José served us eggs and coffee before we got on the road. We traveled to a place botanized years prior - a road that ended at a hillside farm Jason was familiar with, a road banked on either side by large stands of Anthurium aff. formosum. The plan was simple enough - park the car, observe some plants, walk up a few kilometers to the cattle farm, ascend some more to the forest edge. What I had not internalized yet was that I should not attempt to keep pace with a former professional athlete while walking up steep slopes.
I managed only about one kilometer in 48 minutes, ascending significantly in that span, all the way to a muddy pasture on a thirty degree grade, substrate and grass islands churned by hooves and rain. At about the halfway point, I told Jason to head up without me (as if he needed permission), and that I was going to take a breather. I sat on a termite-chewed log on the forest edge, pins and needles crawling down my arms and up my feet, watching mosquitoes arrive like buzzards.
I had an amazing view from my otherwise uncomfortable log bench; the mountains all around plunged into valleys lined by forest. I had the clearest thought of the day as I sat wondering if my physiological response to over-exertion would pass before I did - I suspect the people here don't leave Costa Rica because it is beautiful, and people like me don't often come all the way out here because it is hard.
I sat for twenty minutes chugging an electrolyte pack and what water I had left. The electrolyte packs were an actual saving grace the whole trip, highly recommended. I sat on a log in the beautiful punishing middle of nowhere and decided that not dying on a hillside was ambitious enough. My 15,000 flat Georgia steps a day were worth nothing here.
After a while, I got up and moved slowly toward the forest edge, still in the distance. I made it a few hundred feet forward before Jason emerged from the trees. He was both bloody and grinning, having seen what he believed to be an undescribed species of pendant Anthurium, carrying the wounds he necessarily bore to see it. Falling from a tree, gashing his shin, and getting the shot, the pain and the profit arriving in the same moment. This, I learned, was fieldwork.
Half a kilometer uphill from my termite log was a forest remnant holding untold species unknown to science. "This is more important, almost, than anything else," he said.
We left much quicker than we came, leaving cash under an old coffee tin in the rancher's barn - a thank-you for him allowing us the luxury to stomp through cow shit. A confused pup saw us off as we headed toward the road and descended back to the truck, his alarmed barks ensuring we stayed a safe distance away from his home and herd. Permission to leave was granted, not assumed, just as permission to enter.
A home grown with love
I need to thank my host while being careful not to share too much. Jason has lived in Costa Rica long enough to speak the language, to know and embody the culture, and to appreciate the biodiversity that the country and region are celebrated worldwide for. He also has seen the landscape change. Many hills have been 'scalped' for agriculture or development, and his own winding mountain road has burst over a few decades from a few homes to more than twenty.
His own home reflects a change in the opposite direction, adjoining a garden that has walked back its delineation between 'contained' and 'reclaimed'. It is walkable, barely, with stone pathways peeking from a thick blanket of nomadic lianas and mosses. The canopy stretches up more than a hundred feet into the sky, a testament to aged trees allowed to live, and opens up in a spot where one of those trees aged past its life, fell, and gave back the light it was borrowing to the rest of the jungle inhabitants.
This was the quietest ninety minutes of the week. I spent a while taking photos, recording the birds and insects narrating their own lives in the background. I was alone, unhurried by anticipation or weather, and I again felt like a kid, looking at something less familiar and with wonder. A walk, through a garden that felt like a jungle, with a camera. Jason is spoiled.
The garden - and I am using the term somewhat loosely in this passage - is more than curation, more than a nice space to touch grass. It is a record of some of his most-admired species: local variants of Monstera and Anthurium sect. Porphyrochitonium feature heavily. One of my favorite aroids, Monstera filamentosa, is locally native and fully enjoys its place on a tree at shoulder height. It is a well-loved, intentional but nearly wild space, and I was lucky to spend time photographing it.
A fast learner
Monday was another early morning, aimed at getting to habitat before the weather turned. We drove south toward Térraba, at one point passing two horses out for a morning walk, apparently either entrusted or neglected by their human keepers. Cars carefully drove around them, executing perhaps the best version of driving I saw while in Costa Rica. We climbed the ridge road, only getting lost and turned around once, until it became too dangerous to drive, then parked and continued on foot. It needs to be said - there are not many roads too risky to drive over in a Hilux.
The hike was described to me as easier than the hike two days prior, and by the time I reached about 1,370 meters I felt that it was understated a bit. I stopped for another ten minutes, this time at a gate to a cattle farm that sort of resembled a bus stop - a simple covered entrance marking the break in barbed wire fencing. I laughed as I rested, leaning on the gate, picturing cows lining up waiting for a truck on a timed route to give them a lift, and began wondering if I was getting heat stroke.
We faced another lengthy climb up a clay-gravel country road toward premontane forest not yet cleared for human development. Jason did his morning intervals while I committed to pacing myself, hopefully avoiding the wall I hit previously. I documented several Anthurium and Monstera species on the way up, resting frequently, running out of water at about 1,575 meters. Finally at 1,600 meters, I hit the forest line, and found Jason, again smiling, that feeling of discovery palpable. Anthurium tarrazuense beamed at us, somehow proud to be seen. We passed a larger specimen, and found a few more visible from the drainage shoulders cut into the jungle's edge to shed water off the road during heavy rain. Monstera tenuis littered trees at the site, as did other pendant Anthurium species and Philodendron verrucosum.
While the site was worth the hike, the win was short-lived. Twenty minutes into exploration of the ridge we heard thunder in the distance. Then, sprinkles. We began heading down, only just clearing the forest line when the sky really opened up. My "I grew up in Florida, some rain isn't a big deal" pride washed away as we scrambled to get cameras and phones into ziploc bags.
The deluge came fast, blowing rain sideways as we descended past 1,500 meters, the ridge opening up to clearings on both sides, more thunder behind us. I jogged down much faster than I waddled up, wondering if I could just tuck and roll at times. The last leg of the descent was a 40 meter trudge back up a hill to get to the truck.
It wasn't until we were back on the road that I noticed I had left my own phone in my pocket on the journey back. Now thoroughly soaked, it wouldn't stay on. My GPS tool, my connection to anything out of shouting distance, and my container for all travel plans and tickets and directions, was now a brick of unusable tech. Observations are, again, hard-fought.
Rewards aren't just handed out
Our final day began with another early morning drive to known Anthurium cascantei habitat, a subvelvet pendant species described by Ortiz and Cedeño-Fonseca in 2024.6 Jason promised an easy jaunt and this time it delivered - a winding drive up an access road had us parking the Hilux, opening the door, and immediately seeing many aroid species. A dirt and clay road was fully banked by forest, washed out in places, walkable, on a mild morning. Several pendants were observable at the site as we hiked up in elevation.
Tuesday took the loose mold of what I had been learning on this trip and shaped it into something more durable - elevation matters as much as any other habitat signifier. We climbed maybe 100 meters in elevation, past 1,000 meters, on a gentle hike that had the forest changing from one covered in bromeliads and Monstera to mosses and pendant Anthurium. A slight change in elevation, a slight change in temperature, and the species populations changed dramatically.
We identified Anthurium cascantei, A. michelii, A. redolens (possibly), A. validifolium (possibly), A. bakeri, and several likely Anthurium sect. Belolonchium candidates, among a host of other Philodendron, Monstera and other aroids. My running lesson that fieldwork and observation were inevitably coupled with a difficult hike, or a treacherous expedition, was turned on its head entirely, on the last day of the trip. We drove, got out of the car, and started taking photos.
The process of care
Perhaps it's a little sanctimonious to turn an ecology observation trip into a greater philosophical conversation about consumption, place, and understanding, but I can't help it. I am not above the urge to travel to such a place simply to enjoy it but the need to question my participation in that place's change over time, however small, isn't really avoidable. I am bad at sitting on a beach and enjoying the beach.
I didn't need to travel to Costa Rica to get a first-person account of humans brushing up against their own pride, and their own humility. Providence Canyon is within an hour's drive of home, what remains of disastrous agricultural practices in cotton cultivation - most likely upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, family Malvaceae - for a few decades in the 1800s. Monoculture farming coupled with no soil conservation methods caused wide-scale soil erosion, opening the earth as deep as 150 feet in places.7
It is now a state park, with hiking trails and a gift shop, marketed as the Little Grand Canyon, its owed existence printed on small signs people walk by on their way to and from the parking lot. I've walked by the signs, I've hiked the trails, and I still needed to travel thousands of miles further to learn their lesson. The erosion scar, now more than a century old, remains as evidence of our ability to reshape and destroy in years what was built over millennia. The grief compounds.
The cotton that was grown here - by enslaved people - was eventually ferried down the Chattahoochee River, which demarcates the state line between Georgia and Alabama through the region, minutes still from my home. The riverfront is its own form of catastrophe followed by restoration, having been walled and dammed in parts to service the textile mills and ports associated with the cotton boom. Columbus and its commerce have ebbed and flowed with the river, eventually converting the riverfront from dams to a whitewater rapids course in 20138 - boaters and kayakers looking for an outdoor thrill. Commerce, called progress.
We do seem to learn from our mistakes eventually. In the same way I often rush into things only to learn that I have created new problems to fix, so did generations of Columbus inhabitants realize that the Chattahoochee couldn't be dammed and walled indefinitely without, er, downstream effects. Species reduction and flooding due to human activity isn't just an inconvenience - there are human price tags attached.
And so conservation becomes en vogue. The Chattahoochee River Conservancy, partnering with Nearly Native Nursery and Whitewater Express, has been working for more than a decade to restore the shoals spider lily, Hymenocallis coronaria, to the rocky banks near the preserved defunct hydropower generators and former dams along the River Walk.9 Seed is collected from wild populations, grown to resilience, and transplanted back to habitat. The same process Jason dedicated to Anthurium brenesii, being done minutes from my porch, by volunteers who care about the same things I do.
Process, it seems, tends to go on regardless of your paying attention to it, or stopping to notice, or bothering to look. The process of grief, of progress; the process of cleanup, the process of care. The lily has its own process, its own often unnoticed bloom, opening at dusk, for a single night, May to June.10 Minutes from my porch, as long as I have been here, a process that was swept up and buried in the flood and fervor of progress, and quietly put back. I will see it in May.
I want to again thank my friend Jason for his gracious hosting of a gringo at his home, allowing me to interrupt his family's normal mode of life for a week, so we could go look at pretty plants and record their data. Thank you. Can't wait to do it again. Pura vida.
