the urge to sort is strong

for some weeks there has been a small pile of dried fall leaves and spent floral petals gathering in the unused corner of my dining room table. from experience, i know if i leave it there long enough, someone (usually my daughter or my best friend) will eventually start absentmindedly playing with the debris while we catch up over tea.  today, my daughter got snared by my trap. she sorted, grouped, pushed, re-assessed, added, and eventually wandered off to resume her work day. i grabbed my camera, pushed the shutter, and declared another day of STILL in the bag.

through line

my husband is writing a book. matter of fact, he has his first deliverable to his editor due at the end of this week. as a result, we spend a lot of time talking about the through line, the red thread as it is sometimes called, of the narrative. clearly, i have through lines on the brain.

mediterranean beach rocks 

ask me Y

we were blanketed in a thick fog all day today. which saturated all the organic matter and highlighted them against a soft gray backdrop. so these red-osier dogwood stems jumped out and caught my attention. i am not sure why i snipped them all into y’s. then again, why not?

red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea)

define “local”

i try very hard to keep STILL local and seasonal. in my experience, digging deeper usually yield more interesting results than throwing my gaze wider, and by necessity, shallower.  so, does the spent planter in front of my coffee shop count as local and seasonal, if the summer plantings it contained included such non-natives as fan palms?  when it comes to flora and fauna, local gets gray very fast. no one would dispute that all native plants and animals are local. but what about the multitude of introduced species?  species that have become so naturalized, over centuries, that they even become symbolic and iconic of a place in which they are non-natives. species like the eucalyptus of california? i would venture to guess, that at least a full third of the plants i photograph in summer (all found within 5 miles of my home) are considered non-native invasives. most brought over by well-meaning western european immigrants for gardens or kitchens over 200 years ago. so, local is loaded. and gray. today, i am choosing to be liberal in my definition of local–as in, found locally.

palm frond in winter

what makes a seedpod good?

a good seedpod is one of my favorite things to find. a good seedpod, to me, is one that is interesting in structure and sturdy enough to transport home. this is my current collection. technically, it is a collection of seeds, seedpods, and seedheads. some of the best seedpods i have seen are in australia, that island continent that evolved in splendid geographic isolation that resulted in all sorts of glorious oddities. i’ve never been to australia. but when i do go, it will be for the seedpods as well as the sun and the surf.

collection of seedpods and seed heads