Do you like to propagate plants on your windowsill? At our house, the sills are brimming with plant starts.
I also like using plant cuttings as bouquets with propagation potential. In the illustration below, you can see that a few of the flower stems are starting to send out roots. The plants pictured here are Shiso, Jasmine, Verbena, Cornflowers, and Fennel.
Bees found the bouquet! This means we’re both propagating and pollinating indoors. It also means that I need to get screen doors.
Above are vases holding nasturtiums. The stems sprouted roots quickly, and we kept putting them back into the ground. Soon, we had glorious orange flowers with lily-pad-like leaves climbing up and down the garden fence.
I set up a kitchen research project to determine whether propagation produces plants that are equal in health to those grown from seed.
This particular batch of nasturtium seeds came from a crop of vine-style orange and red nasturtiums, Tropaeolum majus, and I did not soak them or winter them over in the freezer. Don’t they look a bit like petite brains?
The results from the research project are in! Seeds grew faster, larger, and sturdier plants than those grown via propagation.
Gardening led to painting. I worked with gouache paint, a vibrant opaque type of watercolor that comes in sexy tubes, and soon the propagation bouquets became handy still-lifes of reproduction in action.
I started including hands in the paintings in a previous series focused on indoor rock climbing. The hands might be pictured ripping the corner of a page, cutting with scissors, or holding a paintbrush, as you see her.
For the last two painting series, I made up two rules:
- The act of creating the work had to be part of the painting.
- The majority of the elements depicted needed to be alive.
The three bees below are different species, and each pollinates a particular flower. I had to swiftly capture their wings in flight, as they were quite lively and needed to be shooed back outside once I drew them on the page. The little roots on the stems speak to the fact that these are not only “cut flowers” but rather that they are alive and fully engaged in propagating. They are days from being returned to garden soil to grow into big, beautiful Fennel, Sorrel, Cornflower, and Verbena plants.
What do you like to stuff your squash blossoms with? Our favorite filling was a combination of cheeses, pesto, and bits of spicy chicken sausage.
These paintings are available as notecards here. I like to have cards within arm’s reach, sitting on the corner of my writing desk, so I designed a case for them. Though the magnetic flap-closing card boxes are stately, I wanted to try something else. This design takes its inspiration from a dresser drawer.
I found a high-quality manufacturer in Lahore, Pakistan who agreed to make the products, and we used Google Translate to convey the specifications. Three weeks after our agreed-upon delivery date, I concluded it had been a scam and was ready to search for another manufacturer. But then, late one afternoon, I was out on the porch observing how the squash plants had undertaken massive land grabs by crisscrossing the entire garden by staying just three inches above the soil. This strategy allowed them to weave a path underneath the other plants.
At about that moment, a yellow DHL truck pulled right up onto the curb, with one set of sizable tires cutting into the grass near the sidewalk so that he wouldn’t block street traffic. The driver wobbled when he came through the front gate, barely able to maneuver the massive eighty-pound box up the stairs to our door. “Sorry these are a bit late,” he said between breaths, “they were held up in customs.”
Ah, so that is what happened.
I just love them.
What shall I paint next?