Partial Sun Newsletter: Volume 2

I planted five palm tree seedlings today. At first, a plant feels like a person who’s been transplanted to a different country. It takes a while to adapt to the way other people live. Plants are like that, too.

–Roberto Burle Marx

HEAL ME WITH PLANTS

What: This NY Times article is particularly personal for me. It’s a piece that came out about a year ago, and six months before I started interning at NYU Langone hospital’s Horticultural Therapy department. Author Ellie Shechet provides a deeper look, a workday in the life of a Horticultural Therapist. Here, the value of plants and the natural world are illuminated. A plant can be a great aesthetic asset in someone’s living room. But in a hospital, for a patient, plants can provide much more – distraction from pain, a spark that triggers a memory, a sense of control, an opportunity to feel the earth through your fingers again.

Check out: The therapy bunnies, Lily and Clovis, who, like the shelves of plants ready to make their rounds, have made their home at the hospital, too.

“There’s nothing more happily out of place in a hospital than something green and delicate and alive. And in a setting where patients routinely feel poked and prodded, isolated and immobile, that act of nurturing a plant can be a transportive part of the recovery process.”

Some Monstera and the shadow of my head at George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

SILENCE AND THE PRESENCE OF EVERYTHING

What: Is there anything more that even needs to be said after hearing “I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.” You already know you’ll be fully absorbed in this interview, five minutes in, seeing the world through a completely different lens.

Check out: This interview with Acoustic Ecologist Gordon Hempton. It’s a different take on the age-old question, “if a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Over the course of thirty years, Hempton has collected hundreds of recorded sounds from all over the world, catalogued and organized into digital folders. But what he’s on the hunt for – the absence of noise, or, “the Last Quiet Place” – is something you could actually consider a practically extinct species in itself. For Hempton, quiet, truly quiet, places should be thought of as something as important to our wellbeing as clean water and unpolluted air. Here’s an excerpt from the episode’s transcript, Hempton speaking:

“Oh, yeah. It’s not the absence of sound. I think a physicist will tell you that true silence does not exist, not on planet Earth with an atmosphere and oceans. When I speak of silence, I often use it synonymously with quiet. I mean silence from modern life, silence from all these sounds that have nothing to do with the natural acoustic system, which is busy communicating. Wildlife are as busy communicating as we are, but it’s not just messages coming from wildlife. I can name some that have been really transformative in my personal life. But it’s also the experience of place, what it means to be in a place.”

Misty cliffs of the Presidio in San Francisco, California.

HOW TO REGAIN YOUR SOUL

Come down Canyon Creek trail on a summer

afternoon

that one place where the valley floor opens out.

You will see

the white butterflies. Because of the way

shadows

come off those vertical rocks in the west, there

are

shafts of sunlight hitting the river and a deep

long purple gorge straight ahead. Put down your

pack.

Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way

when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being

built,

when campfires lighted caves. The white

butterflies dance

by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly

anything

could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the

canyon

and then shines back through the white wings to

be you again.

–William Stafford (1914-1993), as reprinted in Poet Healer: Contemporary Poems for Health & Healing, compiled by Chip Spann

Partial Sun Newsletter: Volume 1

I’ve been compiling this long list of places, people, studios, articles in the world of plants/design/landscape/ecology/food. It’s in a google doc simply titled, “Things of Note.” Every time I come across an article, or a new book, I add it to the list. I felt it was time that I turn that long list into something a little more organized and digestible. So think of this as a type of newsletter perhaps… monthly, or maybe even more frequently, where I distill a few of the things I’m consuming related to the natural world. So, here’s Volume I. Enjoy.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

-Mary Oliver, Upstream

WILD SEED PROJECT

What: A Portland, Maine-based organization with a mission to return native plants to the landscape. Their site is full of interesting content and information on native plants, as well as the pollinators, wildlife, and habitats that native landscapes help to preserve. They define Native Plants  as “species of trees, shrubs, vines, wildflowers, grasses and ferns that grew in eastern North America before Colonial times and co-evolved, over millennia, with the region’s animals, insects, amphibians, bacteria and fungi. Many of these native plants depend on one another for survival, and their interrelationships help sustain ecosystems.” 

Check out: Their magazines. I ordered a few previous issues through their online shop and just received them in the mail. Wild Seed just put out its 6th Volume, but they all have really informative and well-written content that would satisfy anyone curious about – in addition to native plants themselves – insects and pollinators, birds, landscape design, fungi and old-growth forests, and landscape restoration. The first article in Volume 5 of Wild Seed is a great read by historical ecologist Kerry Hardy. Here’s an excerpt, towards the end of “Same Place, Different Land,” that hits home: 

“We can still catch glimpses of former landscapes–such as a pocket of blue-eyed grass in a field, or false Solomon’s seal along its edge. Autumn meadows still glow with goldenrod, silverrod and asters, bordered by colorful blueberry, blackberry, huckleberry and staghorn sumac. But so much has gone missing and been forgotten. 

Ecologists refer to this as ‘shifting baselines,’ where each new generation takes the diminished health and complexity of an ecosystem as normal, never realizing the profusion of life and the diversity that once flourished.”

A stack of Wild Seed.

READING THE FORESTED LANDSCAPE

What: A  book by ecologist Tom Wessels that’s like searching for clues at the scene of a crime – except, these clues consist of moss and lichen covering a tree stump. And you’re not looking for a murderer, per se, but rather unraveling the mystery of all the factors, both human and natural, that influence the way a landscape looks today. 

Check out: The section on “nurse logs” (Chapter 6: Cradles and Pillows). It’s a fascinating dissection into how fallen trees, seemingly void of all life, can become sites of new growth. Another interesting tidbit: if you’ve walked through a forest and seen a single tree that splits into multiple different trunks, that could be a sign of logging. But probably my favorite aspect of this book is the way it’s illustrated. The etchings by Brian D. Cohen, in addition to being more informative and detailed than photographs, have this uncanny, quiet vibe about them that really makes you look. 

A beech tree grows on a nurse log in the forested landscape of Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center in Garrison, NY.

HOW A COLLEGE FINAL BECAME A LESSON IN SURVIVAL

What: If you have 5 minutes, read this article from the New York Times about an unconventional assignment a professor gave to his students: “Go outside and take a photo of the natural world.” It’s timely, and a reminder that some comfort and respite can be found all around us when we pay a little more attention. 

Check out: An excerpt from the author/professor, Daniel Mason, on some of the photos that were shared by his students:

“There was a waterfall from the hills of Georgia; a pasture in Venus, Texas; budding magnolias in New Jersey. A student in Nome, Alaska, posted a bare cottonwood covered with snow. An Australian student shared a gum tree blooming after the wildfires there. There were sunrises in California and roadside mushrooms. Snow-filled woods and fruiting lemons. A standoff between a dog and lizard on a bright green lawn. A southern stingray from the Gulf of Mexico. Fritillaries, songbirds. A Carolina swamp. And the same sky in Ohio and Delaware as out the window of my room.”

As for what’s outside in my natural world, here’s some Sugar Magnolia Snap Peas from the Hudson Valley Seed Company, breaking through the soil in my planter. 

Sugar Magnolia Snap Peas emerging. I will need to build a trellis for them to climb on, soon.

Green is the sincerest color

My sister sent me a picture of an excerpt. “I thought you might appreciate this,” she texted with the photo. It was a page from colour and textile designer Margrethe Odgaard’s Shades of Light. I thought I’d share the excerpt below with some photographs. It’s one of those passages that reveals itself more and more the first, second, third time you read it through.

Green is primarily and almost exclusively associated with nature. It is the color of growth, life and balance and is often attributed values such as natural, calm and sincere.

… Nature’s shades of green are endless and ubiquitous. Take the succulent, fresh and crisp shades of green found in a tender beech wood, birds chirping, everything dappled with sunlight filtering through the leafy canopy.

The blue-green tones in a calm, cool, coniferous forest with the muted sounds of swaying tree tops,

Or the iridescent metallic green eyes and wings of certain insects with an almost other-wordly sheen.

There is something disarming and soothing about green, as if our senses instinctively know that green has only the best intentions.