july is berry season

berry season starts with bang with strawberries in late june, but july is when the real show arrives. raspberries are free for the picking on most roadsides, alleyways, and and overgrown gardens. And in within a week or so, blueberries will crown the berry season. while strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries get all the attention, we have a lot of forageable secondary berries here in the north: blackberries, gooseberries, honeysuckle, dewberry, elderberries, serviceberries (aka juneberries), and of course cranberries. tis the season of abundance. and ice cream smothered in raspberry sauce.

blackcap raspberries

looks like a thistle, smells like a thistle…but not a thistle

many times i have written how velcro was inspired by burdock. little known fact: in norwegian burdock is borre and velcro borrelås, which translates to “burdock lock”. q.e.d.

burdock in bloom (Arctium)

yet again

queen anne’s lace. yes, i know. i keep coming back to it. in all its forms. but especially those seedheads. i’ll never get sick of them. if you are sick of them, i will always love you, but you are wrong.

queen anne’s lace (wild carrot)

hortensia

sometimes simple is best. and sometimes simple is all you got.

pink hydrangea flower

one day in july

yesterday, a photographer and writer from my local newspaper (the minneapolis star/tribune…aka the strib) came out t0 the house to take a few photos of me “doing STILL.” the photos will be part of a feature story they plan to run in september, in celebration of 10 years of STILL. so, in order to give the photographer something to work with, i took a stroll around my yard and gathered a handful of specimens. she took a few photos. and i thought maybe we were done. but we weren’t. she asked–gulp–if i would make a STILL composition. making assemblages and compositions on the spot, while carrying on a conversation/interview with the writer, is hard for me. it’s asking me to do a split brain thing–talk (intelligently) about my STILL process, and do my (inuitive) STILL process at the same time. but of course, what always happens when i am working under time pressure and other constraints, what came out was better than i would have expected. thanks, rene, for cracking the whip.

bit and pieces from a stroll through my yard in mid-july