Backyard Flowers

The backyard flowers exhibit I mentioned the other day gets hung on Monday, Oct. 8 but the seed of the show was planted more than 15 years ago while working on a project with a dear friend, now deceased. Frank was an ethno-botanist by training and a enlightened teacher by inclination. Always on the move, a nomad in search of the ineffable while on a physical quest to meet a member of every plant family on the face of the earth. For 15 years, he called our home his "East Coast home." Sometimes he stayed for months at a time, other times for a weekend drive-by on his way to some plant gathering.

Echinacea 3-a

For a couple of years starting in the mid- to late 90s, we walked our 2½ acres of land we call Woods Edge. We were looking for and  identifying the plants living on the land. In all, we came up with a list of over 100 species!

In fairness, I should have written "Frank identified the plants." I’ve always had trouble discerning the minute differences in plants that’s necessary to accurately name them. And even if I had such a penchant, I doubt I could have ever remembered them.

The possibility of absorbing and retaining thousands of common and Latin names was never in the cards. So on our walks I recorded each plant in a notebook and then back at the house researched as many taxonomical details as Frank was confident in certifying.

All of which is to say, I’m not the botanist type. But I do have a life-long affinity for plants.

Magnolia

My particular interest in that earlier project was not photographic but revolved instead around the role of the plants in relation to the land they live on as well as their usefulness to me. I was experimenting with making oils, tinctures, spagyrics, meads, and more – attempting to take in the whole panoply of plant uses.

The last time I was with Frank was five years ago this past August. During that visit I wanted to tell him about a photo project I had just begun, photographing the plants on the list that we’d created years earlier. But at that point I only had a few images to show him so instead, I decided to wait for some future visit when the project was farther along.

Regrettably, I never had the opportunity to do that. He died unexpectedly two weeks later in August of 2009. In an effort to honor and advance his work, family members, both by birth and by choice, formed a non-profit organization. If you’re interested, check out the Plants and Healers website.

The shock of his death set the project back for a few years. The bulk of the photographs in the exhibit were made in the past two years and all but two of the gum prints in the show have been printed in the past 6 months.

Amanita