woodsorrelpainting

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love being in town where 80% of the bird population is crows and ravens because i open my window a crack for the nice breeze and my room is immediately filled with the sounds of 20 little guys yelling AWWWWWW AWWWWWW outside my home

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When I say "connect with nature" I don't just mean the aesthetic forests with deer and beautiful flowers.

I mean the weeds growing through concrete, the fungus that grows on the rotten shed, the nettles that always seem to return and the scary, spindly cellar spider in the corner of the bathroom.

Nature is not always pretty or magical - the pigeons and seagulls you swat at are nature too, the wasps and flies that hover by your meals are animals too, store-bought strawberries and the leaves that fall from your neighbour's tree are not all that different from the Giant Sequoias and it's seeds.

If you want to connect and understand nature, I mean *really* connect to it, in it's entirety, you have to seek out and learn about the ugly, scary and mundane things as well. You don't have to like it, just don't forget that it's there.

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for a literature essay im writing im inexplicably looking up a lot of articles abt private pools and american culture and now im curious.

i'm dutch, and to me a private pool seems like the height of ostentatious luxury. i don't know anyone in my country who has a private pool, i grew up swimming in public pools or whatever random body of water was nearby, lakes or rivers or canals or whatever. american media has so many private pools though, are they really that common?

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in my opinion it is essential to make a "right to garden" law that means no one can stop you from growing whatever you want in your yard.

I think it should even apply to renters so a landlord is required to allow you to have a garden

And I think this can become a reality

[woodsorrelpainting]

Local elections and local politics are some of the most important for the environmental cause.

Laws forbidding you from keeping chickens, growing vegetables, or having a pollinator garden? Parks have invasive bushes and giant lawns but no natural space? Town has no sidewalks? Wetland getting sold to a developer?

These are LOCAL laws, LOCAL policies, and LOCAL decision-making!

Which means they can be changed on a local level. It is much easier than changing the whole world, and can start a pattern of other places doing the same thing.

Vote in local elections. Be involved in local politics. Go to town hall meetings. Learn what plans there are for your community.

Do it for the plants, the bugs, the animals, and the humans, which are their caretakers.🕷️🐞🐝🦋🐛☘️🌸🌺🪷🌾🌿🌱🌼🌻🌵🦎🐌🦇🐿️

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it's not really similar to anything else i've made but i think this is art and im kinda in the "uploading my portfolio" phase of getting a new social media account so here you go

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From last October. The pods were still hanging on the honey locust tree because the large Ice Age mammals that used to eat them and spread the seeds just never come around anymore. I read but haven’t tested it that the stuff inside the pods around the seeds is sweeter than honey (not recommended b/c I don’t know if it’s toxic). Somebody back in the Pleistocene had a sweet tooth and it seems to be mastodons. Remnants of these pods have been found in their manure. And the huge thorns and spines at a certain height on the trees? They were to discourage mastodons from pushing the whole tree over to get the pods just out of reach! Now you know.

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That's what I was thinking but... idk that much about bugs haha. Thank you though!

[ID: Left picture is of a fallen cactus paddle. Several white fuzzy insects cover its surface. Some red splotches are visible, presumably from the insects.

Right picture is a close up of a woody cactus stem. It shows the texture and creases visible with some more insects visible. END ID]

I was having a weird day (overstimulated) until I saw this cactus outside of a bbq place. I thought it was cool at least haha

I thought for a moment that the cactus paddle was bloody but I think it's actually from those bugs. I don't know what kind of bugs that is though, so don't ask

[woodsorrelpainting]

y'all ever reach the end of google

[woodsorrelpainting]

[ID: Left picture is of a fallen cactus paddle. Several white fuzzy insects cover its surface. Some red splotches are visible, presumably from the insects.

Right picture is a close up of a woody cactus stem. It shows the texture and creases visible with some more insects visible. END ID]

I was having a weird day (overstimulated) until I saw this cactus outside of a bbq place. I thought it was cool at least haha

I thought for a moment that the cactus paddle was bloody but I think it's actually from those bugs. I don't know what kind of bugs that is though, so don't ask

[woodsorrelpainting]

I’m in the process of identifying some plant specimens and the biggest thing I’ve learned is that finding keys for my region is incredibly difficult. They’re either free online but pretty limited or very expensive books that would be helpful, but we don’t have money for them. I’ve been working out of Flora of the Pacific Northwest (which doesn’t even technically cover this region but it’s close enough) but the copy we have it from 1996. It’s a really great key but the problem is that a lot of the information is dated which makes cross referencing online a bit difficult. I knew the specimen I was working with might be in the Symphyotrichum genus. However, my key doesn’t have Symphyotrichum! In the photo is a list of different genera names that have historically been associated with Symphyotrichum. It becomes a scavenger hunt of either painstakingly keying my way to the correct genus (in Asteraceae I simply refuse) or cross referencing the index! There are a bunch of other ways to get to the right part of my book such as finding the historical name for the type species etc. but I just think it’s so interesting how much systematics have changed in the last ~30 years due to genotyping! It’s such a cool topic!

[woodsorrelpainting]

Migration.

A bit hard to photograph but this was my final painting for my color for illustrators class this past semester! Excited to keep doing more gouache paintings in the future though.

[woodsorrelpainting]

I've found that YouTube is a great resource for the use of plants where text resources on the internet have nothing.

I've been researching the use of kudzu and I found this video on how to make kudzu root powder including how it can be used in cooking.

Right now I'm trying to follow this video in how to process kudzu vines into thread for textiles.

Kudzu has been known in China, Japan and Korea for thousands of years to be an amazingly useful plant!

The forester where I work has applied roundup to the kudzu patch over and over to get rid of it, but it comes back every time. Pesticides are applied to large areas to get rid of kudzu. But this is a plant useful for human needs.

I can hear you say, "Use kudzu instead of killing it? You must be crazy! It takes over and destroys ecosystems!"

But the monoculture corn and cotton fields that give us food and clothing now take over and destroy ecosystems, and those plants need synthetic fertilizers and all sorts of pesticides that wash into the streams and poison the water. Kudzu doesn't need to be weeded or fertilized, it is too ferocious for that nonsense, in fact it fertilizes the ground because it is a legume which fixes nitrogen.

And in the parts of the kudzu patch where it hasn't yet overgrown into huge thickets, it has plenty of ferns, brambles, sedges, and asters.

I think if folks were getting out there with an axe like in the video and chopping the roots out of the ground, and harvesting the vines as well, the kudzu would not grow to where it swallows everything.

Imagine a rotation where a kudzu patch is used to harvest vines for fibers, then it is used as a pasture for goats, then the kudzu roots are harvested, then the kudzu patch can be used for other crops after being fertilized by the nitrogen fixation and manure.

This operation could make goat milk soap scented with kudzu flowers...kudzu paper...kudzu baskets...

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Just had a vivid memory return to me of a long time ago one of my mom's friends after hearing I was autistic recommended a book to me with an autistic main character (I never finished it, I just didn't like it. I don't even remember the title)

And the main character, he hated the color orange. Which is fine, I don't even particularly like the color orange most of the time, there are certain bright shades of it that cause my skin to crawl, I get it. He says it's all shades of orange, still fine, people can have preferences. And then he says the reason he doesn't like it is that "it's a color that doesn't occur in nature."

Blatantly untrue! What about tiger lillies? What about sunsets? Tigers? Monarch butterflies? Orange tulips? Those annoying Asian lady beetles? Fuckin' oranges?

It's fine if you don't like orange but it's certainly not an unnatural color!

Everytime I remember this I try to think of another orange thing in nature. I am now an orange appreciator out of spite for that book.

[woodsorrelpainting]

ok i will try to reblog and post here again

we've been going through some stuff here (again 😞) and truly i am exhausted!! but the weather is cooling down a little teeny bit and so i feel better than i did during the summer months

ive also just sort of had some mental health issues too-- related to the summer heat of course

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okay well I'm finally recovered from CoVID. It was....... awful. But I'm better now, and hopefully I'll catch up on the work I definitely meant to get done last week

Although, I've run into some snags with sourcing my prints (they came out wrong :( ) so I'm not actually sure what all I can realistically do right now. But I'll figure something out!

I might start trying to sell originals, actually. That'd certainly be a little cheaper for me to do. But I'll have to figure that out too-- so much figuring out to do! It's tiring