Tree Project Re-Start

-
Platanus (Restart)

Hiroshi gave me new seeds after my lovely persimmon went to sleep. (I'm still watering it, by the way, and keeping my fingers crossed that it will somehow come back to life; Hiroshi says nature is strong and unpredictable!)

These are planatus seeds. They are fluffy and spindly, hard and soft simultaneously.

Platanus (Restart)

The instructions are to mix the seeds with some soil, add some moisture, and then put them in a ziplock bag in the fridge. For two months. After that I'm supposed to dump the whole mixture into a small terracotta pot and keep it watered. And warm.

So that'll be December in New York. I hope it'll be warm enough in the sun-room. The heat just came on last night and right now the entire apartment feels like a sauna, so presumably we'll have warmth enough to grow with. I still feel like a failure with the persimmon, but I'm happy to get another chance.

Platanus (Restart)

The Planatus Orientalis, aka the Oriental Plane, is a fast growing deciduous flowering tree. If the roots take it looks like it might grow 20 to 30 cm in the first year! Look at Plants for a Future and the Wikipedia article for some more information and some great pictures.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
The process of bringing a project to completion is the hardest part. It's tough to let go. When I'm inside the work I feel alive, activated, engaged. The end stage is a separate death. When is enough, enough? These pictures are page-spreads from my book,"Swimming at the Center of the World," which is about my experiences working in China during 2005 and 2006. It's been a very long process thus far and I'm thrilled, actually, to say that the first draft is done, or almost done. So you see, at this point I'm not even close to finally finished. Right now I'm having trouble walking away from the end of the beginning. One of the conversations we have in class is about the moment when your work no longer belongs to you. After all the sweat and anguish - about subject, style, intention, edit, color, contrast, paper, print size, and ending finally with presentation - there comes a time when I have to step back and let it go. At that moment it belongs to the
Read more

Wild Callahan

-
Image
Walking in the winter with Diana and Brendan; I'm not going to not see the Callahan trees surrounding me. Automatic. Can't help it. I know it's cliche. Sorry about that. But there's history here too. The contrast, the sequence, the rhythm, the simplicity. Those Callahan pictures from the 1950s resonate for me; they come to back to me from my earliest thoughts of pictures and photography. Do an image google if you're not sure what I'm talking about. And do you remember the conversation that's in the background, especially of the series of weeds in snow? The story as I recall it is around Callahan's introduction to photography at a workshop in Detroit by Ansel Adams. Apparently there was a long discussion about how to expose properly for snow — how to keep the detail in the negative but not underexpose, how to compensate in the developing, how to print it just down enough to make it feel bright but not too bright. Even if you've never done
Read more

surface

-
Image
i'm thinking about surfaces. is that a picture? the nothing below the something above the flat of it. a question lifts above and hovers. is that a picture? if i walk up to you and breathe will you recoil, sink beneath, or respond. i see a surface and touch nothing, lines. skin. i want to make a picture so i need to surface.
Read more