Plants, Botanical Printing and Time

 

Time was, once upon a time, in another time and place. . . .limitless.  There was plenty of it.  Days lasted forever.  Eons passed between one Christmas and another.  Turning 16 seemed out of reach…too far into the future to even imagine.  Our culture has developed an entire vernacular dealing with time.  We ask questions about it.  Ponder it.  Is time a circular expanse or a linear continuum?  A human construct, a tool?  Relative or fixed?  We say there’s never enough time.  Too much time.  It moves too fast, too slow.   And always it remains an illusive quicksilver river ebbing and flowing with the rhythm of the universe.  A phenomena that seems so important yet still and always out of our grasp.  Like a high flying lightening bug.  Now you see it now you don’t.  And you’ll never catch it.

I don’t know why I got off on this tangent.  My intention was simply to post images of five garments I made recently.  Printed with leaves.  Botanical prints.  But when I look at them, I realize they represent time…or at least a particular moment in time.  A time in spring when fresh green and fresh tannin bursts forth after a long dormant period.  They’re fossils to me.  Captured images.  A likening of how it was in a certain moment, in a particular woodland, on just such a day in a predictable season.  In this country on this earth in this solar system nestled in a galaxy spinning in a colossal mind-boggling universe that once upon a time exploded into being.  This is why I love botanical printing.  It captures a moment in time, embodying the fleeting, transient nature of existence.

 

 

 

Perseverance

This morning, in the early hours, I walked around and through the flowers–again overwhelmed by  volunteers–the plants that keep giving and giving.  Reappearing each year through no effort of my own.  From perennials to the self-seeding annuals– zinnias, marigolds, purple basil, cleome and others.

I was thinking “you know, they don’t have to do this,” this constant yearly rebirthing of beauty.  They don’t have to keep giving–making the world a more welcoming place.  But they do.  And their will to just stand, to keep on keeping on humbles me.  The cleome seed, small as a drop of pepper, that landed in a crack on the pavement?–what were the odds that it could germinate and push through the hard non-yielding environment that surrounded it?

But it did and I, who am often prone to silently mourning the condition of the world, sensed a small glimmer of hope witnessing this true grit.  Truly humbled by this manifestation of perserverance.

As this hickory, unconcerned that its back is up against a wall stands steadfast in its will to “be.” To prevail. Manifesting a life force that cannot be denied.

I must hold on to this truism–this  sense of both hope and perseverance. Must wrap my arms around its trunk and daily reaffirm that the morass of our culture–of the world’s culture–is not permanent. Will fall by the wayside long before nature’s steadfastness diminishes.

For me, eco printing honors this spirit.

 

 

 

 

One Person’s Trash….etc.

I’m drawn to discarded stuff. Not garbage exactly–but things that can maybe be reused or have some sort of intrinsic value–to me at least. This holds true for most areas of my life. For example, I don’t buy new clothes but I do upcycle/recycle old one–the discards of other’s–or I rework my own.

And this brings me to the subject of this post, which on the surface appears to be a logwood scarf printed with buckeye leaves.

But actually, I’m just as interested in the location of the buckeye tree itself as it sits on one of my favorite foraging lots–an urban “pit of despair”–littered with broken  bottles, an old orange sofa, poison ivy and the detritus of years of haphazard littering.  But looking a bit closer, it’s also a rich and varied ecosystem.  Tons of dock, bitter lettuce, sumac, black walnut, tree of heaven and other plants I’m beginning to identify.  In fact, yesterday when I arrived I found three bright orange California poppies begging for acknowledgment.  And though I’m loathe to pick something still attached to the earth, I did pick these three. Mainly because they were leaning so precariously into the traffic of a very busy urban thoroughfare that it’s a wonder I didn’t loose my butt bending over to pick them.