March – an Inconstant Month

     Nick Grooms’s book, “The Seasons: A Celebration of the English Year,” explores old English traditions associated with the seasons. Writing of spring, he muses that we have a notion of spring, warm air and gentle breezes, born often from romantic poetry. But far from the reality.

     This March featured both winter and summer. Nights in the 30s and much wind, then five days of 70° weather, and now, regular Northwest spring – changeable. But it is spring – robins call before dawn, yellow daffodils brighten the island gray, and gardeners prepare, cleaning beds and spreading compost.

     I’ve been getting ready for my show titled: “Earth Apparelled with Plants: Watercolors, Artists’ Books, & Hand-colored Prints.” It opens on May 2 at the Elisabeth C. Miller Horticultural Library at the University of Washington. The show will include large watercolor paintings of four months of meadow flowers. Flowers and weeds gathered from parking lots, roadsides, and garden, posed in jars on my table while I drew. These are the flowers that grow in wild, and gardener created spaces like cornflowers, poppies, cosmos, foxglove, baby blue eyes, lupine, Queen Anne’s lace – self-seeding and sturdy, and so appealing as they grow skeletal in autumn.

     A series called “Pockets Books” is another part of the exhibition – 20 accordion-fold books, with 10 6”x4” pages, each with an obsolete library circulation card in a library pocket, embellished with a line drawing. The research, the relating of book titles to image (and both to the foldbook title, lifted from John Gerard’s charming 16^th century prose), along with drawing 200 images, cutting and folding foldbooks, and pasting pockets to pages, took months of happy work this winter. (Well, it also led to a shoulder impingement from a lot of holding pockets and paper in place – but physical therapy is fixing that.)

     It was really a long, dark winter. I am not sorry to see it leave, though it fights departure. You can always hope that spring might bring better things to the world. And in the meantime, appreciate light evenings, growing warmth, and the world beginning to be even more “apparelled with plants.”