A Poetic Tribute to Whidbey’s Flora

By Mary Reddy • Photos by Nia Martin

What prompts a person who has been a blackjack dealer, congressional staffer, craft store owner, ambassadorial spouse, realtor, and office manager to write a chapbook filled with plants and poems? Add poet to that list of occupations and it begins to make sense. The book is titled “A Whidbey Botanical” and Linda Beeman is its multifaceted creator.

The slim volume features 22 delicate watercolor sketches of flora—including swordfern, hellebore, cedar, and lichen— along with poems and snippets of folklore or curious facts related to each. The watercolors are loosely arranged by season, from January to December, with Beeman finding inspiration in the lush growth of her immediate environment. “Some of the plants are wild, some are weeds,” she noted, “and a few, like the crocosmia, I planted myself.” Altogether, they represent a microcosm of Whidbey Island’s Pacific Northwest landscape.

Why a chapbook? This format has its roots in European history, when itinerant peddlers, known as chapmen, sold pamphlets door-to-door. These small, affordable books often contained poetry, ballads, or religious or political tracts.

Closeup of a woman's hands as she paints watercolor illustrations in a handmade booklet — *Linda Beeman works on her watercolor illustrations in her Whidbey Island studio*

Beeman began painting with watercolors about five years ago, appreciating its calming effect. She and a friend once decided to paint a watercolor a day as an antidote to obsessing over politics. Working on “A Whidbey Botanical” shifted her into engaging with the world of nature just outside her door. Painting with watercolors, she observed, “forces me to focus, to pay attention in ways I wouldn’t ordinarily.”

Working with a simple set of watercolor paints, much like a child’s paintbox, Beeman paints loosely and improvisationally. She views her botanical subjects up close, sometimes beginning with a simple pencil sketch, often using color to hint at form. Despite the book’s title, these sketches are not a typical botanist’s rendering. On the contrary, her paintings suggest the essentials of the plant, rather than rendering them in exact detail. “I have a tendency to be too fussy, so I try to mitigate that. So many of my drawings are terrible, but it doesn’t matter. Like the tech bros who preach, you learn more by failing. I just tell myself to loosen up. That’s not easy for a Virgo.”

The poems create visual images as well. In one, she wrote,

Huckleberries stained our summers sweetly

In another, she described the broad-leafed starflowers,

miniature pink petals six around a hair-thin stem floating above whorl leaf skirts

Among the curious facts she offers, we learn that foxgloves were once known as folk’s gloves, that crab apples symbolize fertility and happy marriages, and that in Elizabethan folklore, hellebore was thought to repel witches and evil spirits.

Beeman first became seriously interested in plants when her husband started a rose garden in the front yard and she tended to it weekly. Caring for the rose garden made her curious to know more. As befits a writer, she wanted to learn the names of everything growing in her immediate environment.

She has always loved making little books, often binding them by hand in limited editions. One example of her handmade books, “Coronavirus Chronicles,” was made “for friends to get us through the pandemic.” Another paid homage to her hometown of Wallace, Idaho, which she remembers as a gritty little mining town—not the bucolic, rural scene people picture small-town life to be. Moving to Whidbey Island took some adjustment. “I always thought of myself as a city girl. But moving to Whidbey was probably the best decision I ever made. Now I’m thankful for the forest bathing [opportunities] my home offers,” exclaimed Beeman, who has found nature to be a relaxing and contemplative outlet. And she has returned the favor— memorializing local flora through painting, and inspiring connection through poetry.

Beeman is a published poet and has won awards from the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Whidbey Island Writers Association. The chapbook, “A Whidbey Botanical,” is available at Moonraker Books in Langley or online on Amazon.