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Virola surinamensis

Learning a new hobby to remember a wonderful scientist
I met my best friend Mari Pesek in my first biology class in college. However, on our list of shared interests, biology trailed rather distantly behind karaoke, Czech festivals, and that time we saw Tom Cruise while no one else was looking. Mari had our first real biology adventure together after finished her Masters' degree, and agreed to spend a month shuttling me up and down Panama Canal in search of saplings for a field experiment. Field work for this project was a little rough at first -- Mari and I were bad at identifying the tree species in my study and worse at finding our boat after a day in the field. One afternoon, we had been wandering a swampy forest patch for an hour when Mari started screamed "VIROLA SURINAMENSIS." Not only did she find the species we were looking for, it happened to be located 10 feet in front of our wayward boat. Moving forward, Virola surinamensis became our favorite species and our all-purpose safe word.  
Mari passed away unexpectedly two months after our time together in Panama. Mari's friends from her Ecology department in Kansas are organizing a memorial quilt, and I was invited to make a quilt square with an image that reminded me of Mari. I decided to embroider a drawing of Virola surinamensis, to commemorate our last great adventure together. 
It turns out that hand embroidery is actually really fun and doesn't require any sort of sewing experience! If you want to make a sampler of your favorite plants, I would take a look this website to get started. 
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