One of the memories that I have from childhood and adolescence is climbing up into the second floor of our barn—it didn’t have a real loft—and seeing bunches of flowers hanging upside down along wires stretched between the roof beams. At some point in the 1970s my mother began growing flowers that were grown to [...]
Archive for the ‘As Object’ Category
Fit To Be Dried
Posted in As Kind, As Object, tagged cockscomb, dried flowers, hydrangeas, statice on October 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
After the Flowers Are Gone
Posted in As Business, As Object, tagged ceramic, glass, vases on May 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Sure. The flowers are the primary attraction in a flower arrangement, but the vase is not exactly beside the point. A florist will, of course, supply you with a vase when you purchase an arrangement, but is it likely to be (1) particularly distinctive, (2) your taste, or (3) something the recipient will want to [...]
Meditation on Oleander
Posted in As Object, As Obliquity, As Symbol, tagged cure, delmhorst, lyric, oleander, toxin on April 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Born a little soon, raised on too much moon,
learned to get by on “Leave me alone.”
Be the restless one, be the burning son.
Then you filled your hands with oleander and
all the strippings of pride gone astray.
All that secret work, all those pretty words
that still don’t hold you
Now you spend your days in the dappled rays
of [...]
Dating With Lichens
Posted in As Landscape, As Object, tagged lichen, moraines, tombstones on March 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A visit to an old graveyard, particularly one that has not been cared for, will generally reveal tombstones covered in lichens. Lichens are composite organisms; they are a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a green alga (or a cyanobacterium). The fungus provides the physical infrastructure and the algae do photosynthetic duty to supply sugars. [...]
Hypoallergenic Flowers
Posted in As Kind, As Object, tagged allergy, hypoallergenic, pollen on March 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Horticulturalist Thomas Leo Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening: The Revolutionary Guide to Healthy Landscaping, found that allergenic plants are often favored by landscapers: ‘School after school is landscaped with the most allergenic plants possible. Even at hospitals I see landscaping so explosively allergenic that it makes me shudder.’” (www.achooallergy.com)
Some allergy-sufferers, fearing a reaction, decline to [...]
The Painted Flower
Posted in As Object, tagged history, painted flowers, painting, Still life on September 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
After fruit, flowers may be the most frequent objects depicted in still-life paintings. If you type “still life flowers,” in the Images search engine of Google, you will be rewarded with pages and pages of images from galleries all over the world that are selling paintings of flowers in a vase.
The vase is important to [...]
