Late Bloomers

One frost already, but not all blooms have gone the way of summer. 

At Lake Cheston, turtlehead appeared a few weeks ago, thanks to the College's new mowing plan. The dam now thickens with color and leaf, providing pleasure for insects and people alike.

At Lake Dimmick, this lovely purple flower pushes up through sandy soil. A quick email to a director of the Herbarium earned this response, "Soapwort Gentian-Gentiana saponaria." This name is meaningless to me, though its popular name lifts my spirits: harvestbells.





May these last flowers keep ringing a bit longer!

Dead Plants and Living Ones

Saturday, a foggy day, included a morning of plant drawing at The Sewanee Herbarium in the new Spencer Hall, a state-of-the-art science building. The Dead Plants Society sponsored the morning in the classroom next to herbarium, which Yolande G and Mary P serve as curators. Participants included assorted Dead Plants women, one 16-year-old, and three artists -- one from as far away as Chattanooga.
Mary P brought in some daffodils, as did others. She also dissected two so we could view them through microscopes. She and Yolande also put out some beautiful plant drawing and painting books for those who wished to use them.

Sandwiched in the middle of the morning, Mary offered a tour of the new building, and I went. With money donated by a Birminghamian, a friend to my family and benefactor of the Birmingham Art Museum, the hall offers classrooms and labs with the most sophisticated equipment and design, including large windows into which one can peer. We peered, happily.

At the end of the morning, we wandered around and looked at the drawings and paintings. One in particular impressed everyone. The maker, shown below at the far right edge of the photograph, is an oil painter. Everyone was impressed by the graceful way she captured the whole plant. Some even thumbed through the rest of her sketch book.I couldn't resist taking an additional photograph of her tools. They are beautiful, well used and respected as an artist's tools should be.
The plant, the eye, the hand, the tools -- creators, all.

Dead Plants Society

I spent a pleasant two hours this morning among women making things -- paintings, drawings, quilt blocks, book pages -- in the simply decorated community center. They are members of the loosely organized Dead Plants Society, dedicated to environmental issues and to meeting with one another each week to chat and craft objects and writings.

A few years ago, my then-neighbor Diane invited me to the opening of a show at Stirling's coffee house. She and other Dead Plants women mounted an exhibit of their work and read and hooted (loved the owl calls) and chatted about the abundant flora and fauna where we live. I wanted at that moment to be a dead plant.

I got to be one, however briefly, today and had a delightful time. Among us were Jill (who said the other day, "I'd love to do crafts all the time," who writes like a dream -- see her blog RoadKillBlues -- and plays banjo with Bazzania); Yolande of the Sewanee Herbarium (who frequently guides informative hikes on the Domain), Mary (a classmate in the School of Letters and also an Herbarium staff member as well as keyboardist with Bazzania), Mary (a former Country Day art teacher in New Orleans whose daughter's "Meals I Have Eaten" blog can be accessed at the right), Jean (who with her husband Harry is a fixture here among naturalists and whose delightful "Nature Notes" appears in the weekly newspaper), and Alex (whose is here about six weeks and then "home" in Chapel Hill for six weeks, off and on).

I am grateful for the company of lively women and for the work of heads and hands, together.