when the muse has better things to do…

…she gives you a molten ball of lava to work with. if you want the full story behind this pretty but predictable image, the full-length rant can be found on my instagram account: @maryjohoffman

sumac leaves in september

saint paul, minnesota

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suspended animation

it is fun to make a beautiful image of something that’s beautiful in nature. but it might be even more fun to make a beautiful image of something that is ugly in nature. fall webworm nests look like someone took all the dust bunnies out of your vacuum cleaner bag and wrapped them around the extremities of tree branches. they lack all the elegance of orb spider webs and then some. they are not only ugly themselves, but they make beautiful trees ugly by infesting them. which makes me all the happier about the delicate ghostliness of these leaves, caught in the silky jaws of a monster.

leaves caught in webworm nest

arden hills, saint paul, minnesota

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botanical fighting words

you, sir, are shaggy and unkempt. you have no backbone. you are rootless. you depend on the support of your generous and upstanding hosts, from whom you leach your livelihood, and to whom you contribute nothing. you think you can survive on sunshine and rainfall, and spend the rest of your life just hanging out with your bearded kin. i do not say this lightly, but, at the end of the day, you, sir, are little more than an epiphytic bromeliad. you are an angiosperm. there. it is said. i throw down my gauntlet.

spanish moss

st. petersburg, florida

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twenty four ways of looking at a sunflower

almost four years into still blog, i have seen a lot of sunflowers. and a lot of tree leaves. and a lot of feathers. and a lot of blank white papers with sunflowers, tree leaves, and feathers stacked beside them waiting to be arranged interestingly. so the first time you post a sunflower, you do the single flower smiling out from the middle of the page. then you maybe think of the daisy chain, with a circle of flower heads providing some graphic interest. then maybe the next time you create a grid, or a random pattern, or a rainfall of sunflower petals, or a single petal-less center staring out like an eye, or a bouquet of stems, or an arrangement of flower calices facing away from the camera. it starts getting interesting when you have have no new ideas at all. that’s part of what this project is about, which i didn’t know when i started. how do you work with the same materials in a new way, year after year? there are only so many seasons, and only so many species. but the ways of looking at them might just be inexhaustible. i don’t know. you’ll have to talk to me in another year…

wild sunflowers

along highway 35W, minneapolis, minnesota

  • Ginny says:

    Something wrong with the person who doesn’t immediately smile at sunflowers, however they are arranged.

    reply
  • margie says:

    what ginny said
    a sure test to weed out the sociopathic personalities

    reply

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rorschach test

just tell me the first thing you see. don’t stop to filter it. there are no right or wrong answers. just look at the image and blurt out what comes to mind. wait, what? you see what??? oh, man. you are messed up.

milkweed seeds

saint paul, minnesota

  • Ginny says:

    Being an ardent gardener and avid propagator/seed collector, I saw… Milkweed seeds! No, I’m not messed up at all :-)

    reply
  • betsy caldwell says:

    I see a “cameo monkey” in a chef’s hat. Yep, that’s it alright.

    reply

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