I admit it.

When the bosses first floated the idea to me of taking a month and a half to put together a series on the 20th anniversary of a local conservation group, I didn't exactly leap out of my chair with excitement.

We'd talked about things that were far sexier, like paddling the entire Kennebec River or a wilderness adventure somewhere. Hey, I like hiking as much as the next guy -- but writing 9 different stories on 9 different hikes in the span of a week, well, let's just say that you can only write the same story so many times.

But you don't have to spend much time with folks who've given significant portions of their life to the Kennebec Land Trust to realize that there's more to conservation than a few good loop hikes.

One of my favorite parts of the site visits for "Sense of Wonder: Kennebec Land Trust Turns 20" is seeing how farmland changes in the span of 2 centuries.

I stumbled, quite literally, across one of the lasting images of the entire project at the Governor Curtis Homestead in Leeds. Howard Lake and I were walking out of the woods, finishing up a hike on the way to our cars in the parking lot, when Howard noticed the asparagus. It was a "Hey, look at that" kind of moment, certainly nothing profound.

Driving away, I couldn't forget about the vegetable, though. The way that one asparagus stalk -- planted who knows how many years ago -- stood defiantly over a plot of field grass painted a picture the way my simple words cannot.

Think about it.

The rest of the Curtis family's gardens were overgrown with grasses and weeds decades ago, but that lone stalk remains. Winters, springs, summers and falls have rotated through dozens of times over -- bring with them hurricane-force winds, ice storms, droughts and floods, yet that stalk still remains vigilant. Tough, not tender; resourceful, unyielding.

It exemplifies New England, its people, its farmers -- and today, it represents the work of conservationists in the age of big business, development and a weak economy.

Asparagus.

Who knew?

-- TB