Dhobi Tree Outside The Smithsonian Castle

Bloom On The Dhobi Tree,  Droid Shots, Washington, D.C., June 2014, photos © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

spring equinox
eclipsed by the dark
side of the moon

Spring arrived under a New Moon and Total Solar Eclipse fanfare, in spite of March with her gray skies and flurries. Snow has melted from the Twin Cities landscape, leaving behind a patchwork of late winter beige and timid green. Anxious for spring color, I revisited photographs from a June walk in the Enid A. Haupt Garden outside the Smithsonian Castle. It was the first time I had seen a Dhobi Tree and it was in full bloom.

The Dhobi Tree (Mussaenda frondosa) is pollinated by butterflies attracted by a modified leaf growing at the base of the flowers. The plant grows wild in India and is part of the Rubiaceae Family which also includes Coffee and Gardenias. I am grateful for urban green space, a refuge and remembrance that every city was once a wild place.

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-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 22nd, 2015

-Part of a yearly practice to write a short form piece of poetry in a Moleskine journal once a day for the next year. Related to post: haiku 4 (one a day) Meets renga 52

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Graft

Graft, Droid Shots, Washington, D.C., June 2014, photos © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

A half mile from the U.S. Capitol in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art stands a 45-foot high by 45-foot wide stainless steel tree, gleaming in the sun. Graft (2008–2009) by American sculptor Roxy Paine (part of the “Dendroid” series) is made from more than 8,000 components and weighs 16,000 pounds. When I leaned against her trunk and grazed the steeled bark, I was reminded of Deborah Butterfield‘s later work in which she adopted junk metal and industrial materials such as barbed wire, pipes, and fencing into her horse sculptures. She first composed Woodrow (1988) in pieces of wood, disassembled the sculpture, and reassembled the horse in bronze. The tension between the natural world sculpted in modern materials speaks to the time in which we live—tethered to our electronics, constantly seeking ground.

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Roxy Paine was born in 1966 in New York and studied at the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico and the Pratt Institute in New York. The artist has shown his other Dendroids on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), in the Olympic Sculpture Park (Seattle), and outside the Museum of Modern Art (Fort Worth, Texas). Read more about his work at his website.

Roxy Paine, Droid Shots, Washington, D.C., June 2014, photos © 2014 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.

-posted on red Ravine, Sunday, March 15th, 2015
-related to: WRITING TOPIC – TREES

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