Plants of Childhood, Revealed

I spent the last few weeks with my studio full to bursting with flora I collected from my family’s farm in eastern Washington.

There was so much in there that I couldn’t actually move around much at all, and the door to the alley was completely blocked, forcing my husband and I to take out the trash through the tricky back gate, instead.

I had driven the three hours over to the farm in the middle of the week on a Wednesday, as I had planned to use native flora to create holiday decorations for the family winery run by my sister and brother-in-law. I had an entire half a notebook filled with my ideas and sketches for the installations. I couldn’t wait to use sagebrush, wild mustard, cattails and more combined with a few varieties of fresh flowers and quite a lot of dried. I was itching to get started.  I had ideas on how to tie the stems of the dried, skeletal plants together and hang them upside down, creating airy, unusual globes. I couldn’t wait to create a ‘meadow’ in the front foyer that looked very much like it did outside in the desert-like natural landscape, but with a twist that made it undeniably holiday.

But then I got sick. Quite sick.

103 degree fevers, deep chills, wracking cough, horrible GI stuff I won’t detail here.  The doctor, once I finally conceded to speak to one, thought perhaps pertussis and E-Coli. Unrelated, she said. Just bad timing to get both at once.

For sure.

It had been suggested to me by my sister a few days before that perhaps I should forego the installations this year, and instead take care of myself. No, I had answered, I’m starting to feel better. I’m over the hump. I can do it.

But I wasn’t over the hump. And, ultimately I had to concede, and walk away from the opportunity. As I languished on the couch the eastern Washington flora remained in the studio mere steps away, drying like I’d planned for it to do, still taking up all the space, delivering a blast of intense, tangy, almost-overwhelming sage zing to the nose of anyone who dared open the door.  In effect, the farm itself was there in the studio: all the plants that I had grown up around and worked around in those years when we moved to the farm in the summer in order to tend to the acres of grapevines.

The dust that was now on the studio’s concrete floor was the same dust that used to cover us from head to toe after a day in the vineyards; blocking up our noses so they felt huge and swollen, making our hair feel like it’d been starched from the inside out, outlining all the boundary lines on our bodies:  sunglasses, shirt sleeves, pant hems, shoe tops. It was a fine yellow-tan dust borne from thousands of years of the crunching and grinding of the rock that still flanked the farm on the west side, overlooking the mighty Columbia River. And now it was on my studio floor and wooden studio table, settling into its many divots and cracks just like it had on our bodies all those years before. It was familiar, that dust. Known.

The blue-green-grey sagebrush with its top-heavy woody branches that caused the plant to droop down at the edges practically radiated with scent there in the studio. As it dried the green faded a bit, replaced by grey. But the scent remained, and the colors became even easier on the eye: nothing fiery, red, glaring or spotlight-grabbing. Just muted blue-green-greys and grey-brown stems—some of my favorite colors, I realized. My chosen palette. The gentler spectrum of nature’s neutrals.

There was Verbascum there in the studio, too: six-foot high, thick-as-my-wrist stems with their scratchy Autumn-dry leaves and thick, seedy tops. Although the farm looked desert-like it wasn’t desert, really. It was an arid lowland underlain by basalt and overlain by loess: wind-blown deposits of silt-sized particles made up primarily of quartz, feldspar, sand, silt and clay. It was an area formed by massive floods and slow-moving glaciers. So not desert, technically. But it had the stillness, vastness and quiet, profound energy of the desert—and Verbascum, with its rod-straight, thick central stem and few upright branches, looked very much like skinny saguaro cactus from a distance. It was an immensely useful plant in myriad ways, and seeded itself with wild abandon, creating cactus-like clusters amid the lower, rounder native flora. I had been excited to use it along with roses, dried grasses, dried eryngium, nigella and Ammi in that front foyer. But seeing it there in the studio I realized that when I use it in the future, I want it to stand alone, or nearly so. It was its very shape that compelled. It was a tall, straight sentinel. Sentinels needed to keep their jobs.

A few times while I was sick I coughed my weary self over to the studio and stood there in the doorway, taking in these plants that have been a part of my life since my parents purchased the farm in 1980, when I was ten years old. Always I’d been a western Washington girl: I tended toward the San Juan Islands with the water and vibrant evergreens. I preferred being covered with leaves and needles, my fingers sticky with pitch. I was magnetically drawn toward the shore, and had bowl after bowl of collected rocks and shells to show for it. Having spent so much time at the farm in my growing up years, with its heat and dust and ever-scent of sage, I had found respite and wonder in its seeming polar opposite.

But those weeks of illness, with the farm now collected together in my studio a few feet away, I was reintroduced to its familiarity, and its comfort. These plants, in the farm’s natural landscape, had shaped me as much as the conifers, maples and water of the west side. When the blast of sage hit me when I opened the studio door, and I unexpectedly teared up, I suddenly had the thought: they had shaped me more.

Sagebrush