"Sort of a hobby. I'm not, like, fixated or anything, I'm just curious about this place. The really good ones could just take a look at a tree and identify it by the shape of the leaves, right? Me, I need a textbook to work out of."

I fished in my pocket held out the small chunk of bark I had scraped from the tree before I began my carving, displaying it between thumb and forefinger.

That was actually for a drastically different project, one that had nothing to do with botany, but as always, Richard didn't need to know that.