time of swelling

Everything is maturing, swelling, darkening…in a word, ripening. Including the milkweed seed pods. One of my all time fav seedpods.

Common milkweed seed pods (Asclepias syriaca)

3,5,7

When I teach flat-lay composition classes (yes, believe it or not people want such a thing!), one of the techniques I teach is “3,5,7.” In other words, the power of odd numbers in a composition. Any gardener will be familiar with the concept, but a surprising number of creatives are not. Two of anything will always make a line in the mind. Four will almost always make a square. But for whatever reason, odd numbers do not do the same thing in the brain: we don’t see distracting pentagons in our minds eye (lol). We simply see a grouping. Thus I offer you three, not four, summer sunflowers.

three varieties of August sunflowers

almost anodized

Wow! Right? This is nothing more than a dried leaf from the Peace Lily I inherited from my neighbor after her mother’s funeral. It has been sitting, neglected, on my deck all summer. I passive aggressively stopped watering it several weeks ago because I couldn’t keep up with its water demands. So needy! So I let it go. And the leaves dried and now look like this. Wow, right?

dried Peace Lily leaf (Spathiphyllum)

Where do you get your inspiration?

Inspiration is a funny thing. Take this photo for instance:

1. Steve and Joe buy a dehydrator this spring for their culinary explorations.
2. I get a random M. C. Escher image in my Instagram feed and it reminds me of doing tessellations in geometry class in middle school. Which I adored.
3. Unrelated to the above, I pop some day lilies in the dehydrator because I need teaching materials for an upcoming conference and I am curious what will happen to them.
4. The dried day lilies surprise me. They look like M.C. Escher birds.
5. I make a dried day lily tessellation for STILL.

Inspiration is a strange and wonder thing. Q.E.D.

dried day lilies (Hemerocallis)

dehydrated but not desiccated

We bought a dehydrator this spring in anticipation of all the culinary botanical harvesting my boys were planning to do. I am not a fan of gadgets in general, and I am especially not a fan of large kitchen gadgets that take up counter space. So, I was not happy when the dehydrator showed up and parked itself on the corner of my new kitchen island. This story not only works out, however, but even was a silver lining–as STILL silver lining. The dehydrator is indeed being used and proving quite irreplaceable for the boys. And due to the low hum of its fan, it found a permanent home on a basement workbench. And, best of all, it is proving to be a very fun STILL laboratory. I’ve only had a few opportunities to play with it due to its high demand, but so far all the flowers and leaves I have placed in there are drying out in a way that is different, dare I say better, than my other method of leaving them under the kitchen counter or in the corner of an unused room for two weeks. These tiger lilies are the same lilies I posted two weeks ago. I placed them in the dehydrator, on low, for about 2 days. I love the results–still colorful yet moody, with movement and texture and detail. YUM! I have put myself back in the queue, but right now the boys are dehydrating our garden peppers. Hurry up boys! I have lots of experiments to try!

dehydrated tiger lily flowers (Lilium lancifolium)