Measuring the Immeasurables

For the past month, I’ve been focusing on the practice of phenology, with the students enrolled in my Year of Flowers class. Phenology is the practice of tracking seasonal changes in nature. Phenology pretends to be a science, but I think it’s really an art, and an art closely allied to poetry. Change is always happening in nature, and it happens gradually. But in order to accurately annotate when change occurs, phenologists have to pinpoint the change (called a phenophase) to a particular moment in time. The data must also be attached to a particular place. At Project Budburst, where I am making reports on five plants I have chosen... (more...)

WAVERLY'S BLOG

Link Love: plants and people

I really liked my friend Joanna Powell Colbert’s idea of declaring Friday (or Freya’s Day) as Link Love day and posting some of her favorite links from the past week. (Love because Freya is the Norwegian goddess just as the name for Friday in Latin and other Romance languages refers to Venus.) So I’ve been collecting some links that I loved this past week and wanted to share them with you. Almost all came from following the threads... [Read more]

Holidays

Flower Carpets for Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi is the name of a Catholic festival, which takes place on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday (which is the Sunday after Pentecost which is the Sunday 50 days after Easter). It was first established by the Council of Vienna in 1311 to promote the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (the belief that the host consecrated in the Mass actually becomes the Body of Christ). It was really promoted during the Reformation as a demonstration of Catholic solidarity. I still remember celebrations of Corpus Christi from my Catholic childhood.... [Read more]

Nature in Place

Measuring the Immeasurables

For the past month, I’ve been focusing on the practice of phenology, with the students enrolled in my Year of Flowers class. Phenology is the practice of tracking seasonal changes in nature. Phenology pretends to be a science, but I think it’s really an art, and an art closely allied to poetry. Change is always happening in nature, and it happens gradually. But in order to accurately annotate when change occurs, phenologists have to pinpoint... [Read more]

Seasons

A Seasonal Pilgrimage

This idea for attuning with a season comes from William Whittmann, a Seattle therapist, who sponsored pilgrimages on the equinoxes and solstices to sacred sites in the city. He chose to align himself with the solar markers of the seasons, those days when the season shifts (or reaches its peak): the equinoxes and the solstices. During the six weeks before the pilgrimage date, he meditated on the season and its metaphors (such as the element (earth... [Read more]

CRAFTS

Leaf Prints

Last week while downtown in Seattle, I found these glorious leaf prints on the sidewalk, and they seem to be the perfect illustration of what happens when nature meets the city (in this case concrete sidewalks). Of course, I went looking for information about what causes leaf prints. The main theory seems to be that they are created by tannins in the leaves, the same tannins that dye the water brown when you make tea or that make your mouth pucker when you drink relatively young red wine. These tannins don’t leach out of leaves when they are green,... [Read more]

Array