My friends in and around Stonington can see some of my pieces at Frills Gallery in Watch Hill. (It’s the white building with a front porch as you first enter town) This is a companion piece to one I made recently. The colors have changed and I’ve used different plants — fringed Bleeding Heart for the ‘tall trees’ and ferns and a Foam Flower leaf for the underbrush. A crazy little Bellflower hugs the beach.
I love what these undulating lines do to the look of the foliage I use. In previous versions of this basic design I’ve used feathery ferns and, in one case nothing but very tiny individual fronds. While this piece uses some ordinary ferns to balance the composition, the real stars of the show are the bold Sensitive Fern at the bottom center and individual leaf clusters from my Fringed Bleeding Heart.
After making the larger version of this seafaring image, I changed a few details and then re-cropped it for a smaller mat. For the smaller piece I also used smaller-scale foliage and added a touch of pastel on the Yellow Archangel at the bottom of the image while leaving the same foliage in its natural state above. Swapping out the standard Bleeding Heart leaf for a smaller Fringed Bleeding Heart worked well.
Both of these are now listed in my Etsy shop.
This simple composition consists of three leaves — scented geranium, ivy, and sweet potato vine — surrounded by a faux double mat. Sometimes simple is best.
I owe the idea for these two scenes to a lovely woman I met at the Artisan’s Market in Providence two weeks ago. She asked me if I agreed that ferns could be used to suggest sails in a nautically themed piece.
Once I put the graphic together I experimented with foliage and found that rose leaves worked well so I used them in the night-time vignette.
For daytime I kept the plant life in the foreground.
For this series of three small pieces, I reversed and alternated pairs of undulating colors to provide interest and contrast for some lovely ferns and well-shaped small leaves. I keep searching for new ways to use color as well as color shading and juxtaposition to enhance my plants. Some experiments work and some don’t. These three survived the cut and landed in my Etsy shop. Weather permitting they’ll be with me in Providence on Saturday.
The single exquisite sweet potato leaf at the center of this composition seems to swirl in a vortex created by the plants around it. They include three varieties of fern — the dagger-like ones are Sensitive Fern — Sweet Woodruff, Ivy, Yellow Archangel and Andromeda. Although I usually design a graphic background for my work, I thought in this case, simple was best.
How many people look at ground cover and see trees? The same is true with ferns and the plants that trail from their hanging baskets. Well, at the risk of sounding immodest, I do.
There is an exhibit at the Desert Museum in Tucson, Arizona that is a true-to-scale relief globe of Earth. The challenge for visitors is to find Mount Everest by touch. It’s not as easy as one might imagine. While not as smooth and polished as a bowling ball, our planet, when scaled down to the approximate size of a beach ball, is hardly distinguishable in texture from a bowling ball and far, far smoother than a golf ball. Why, then, be surprised when a leaflet from a single fern frond looks a bit like a giant Sequoia?
Even though I created it, this hill of little ferns and strange trees makes me want to see what’s on the other side. I’m busy replenishing my Etsy inventory after last Saturday’s trip to the Artisan’s Market at Lippett Park in Providence. Will miss next week’s market and return on June 29th.
My stock of interesting pressed foliage is growing so fast it’s hard to know what to play with next.
I use Ralph Waldo Emerson quotations (and those of other wise men and women) in many of my botanical pieces. A lovely woman I met today at the Providence Artisan’s Market suggested I use this one from the great Massachusetts sage. While enhancing it with botanicals may prove a challenge — the quote is too long to repeat many times in a legible font — it brought tears to my eyes so it must happen!
“To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded.”
Here’s an example of literature as foundation for my work:
My Stonington Garden 
