Photo: a botany lesson, somewhere in southwest Saskatchewan

A few kilometres or so east of Kindersley, we turn south onto a sideroad -- some 30 kilometres of dead straight, sometimes loose gravel, it turns out. It's a slow drive if we don't want to nick our rental van with flying stones. Farmers collecting roadside haybales wave at us; not many tourists come this way, and in a white van, we can't be anything else. We make our drive even slower by stopping, in the middle of our "lane," to find out what's growing there, close up.