My world IS flat

I do not remember when I started flattening things. But I do remember when I started doing things with the results. We were living in Joisey, more or less at the Route 46/I-75 junction. In this complete absence of anything not man-made I was fascinated by the variety of foliage in the drainage ditches. Within a couple months I would pullover & randomly press plants I found ANYWHERE. Lucky for me, A has absolutely no problem flying across lanes of traffic so I can hop out & get a snip of leaf or bloom or bark.

Earlier this year I made my return to the Herbarium on campus to begin the cross-reference of the Wood Collection. An herbarium for those who do not know is a library of plant specimens. It was here I learned there is a right way to press plants (& I was mostly doing it) & a wrong way to record information (& I was doing that, too).

I was fortunate to have access to the images I did when Kathy & I made this quilt "Floristic Inventory of Kanapaha Botanical Gardens" (originally exhibited at the Florida Museum of Natural History in 2006) & compulsive enough to record the information from the source labels on the back (with legend).

It has been a few years (wow! years) since I saw this quilt, it has been traveling off&on & I do not own it, so I do not see it between trips, either. As I look at these old pictures I wonder that A never once suggested that perhaps I needed a psych referral. Instead he listened patiently while I explained the intricacies of digitally recreating the shadows behind the native grape for reproduction on fabric. Lucky for him he can sleep with his eyes open.

Seriously, what was I thinking?