Grancy Greybeard
Chionanthus virginicus · year one
Last year I planted two American Fringe Trees — Grancy Greybeard — one on each side of the stone walking path that takes you into Sequel. They are a year old. Two feet tall. They are babies. And they are already teaching me something.
The Eastern tree is thriving. It gets full sun.
The western tree is the smallest and is shaded by other small plants that block its access to full sun. It should eventually outgrow them.
The walkway features the two one-year-old trees, barely visible, standing 10 feet away from the center.
I chose them deliberately, the way I choose every element in my living sculptures. In Symbiosis at Lawndale, every plant was a decision about relationship — who would it feed, what would it host, how would it move nutrients and carbon through the system. Sequel is the same conversation, carried forward. The fringe trees at its threshold are not decorative. They are a proposition.
Chionanthus virginicus grows naturally at the edges — along woody draws and stream banks, in the transitional zones where forest gives way to coastal prairie.
That is exactly where I placed them: flanking the stone path, at the threshold. You pass between them to enter the work. The living sculpture begins before you know it has begun.
The fringe tree does its most important work in the margins — the places most overlooked, most degraded, most in need of rebuilding. That is where Sequel lives too.
Houston's coastal prairie is one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America. Less than 1% of the original system remains. And yet here we are — 600 square miles of city, a long growing season, 2.3 million people — sitting on an extraordinary opportunity to rebuild it, one threshold at a time.
A close-up of the trees soft, airy beard.
What these two small trees are doing.
Years spent studying the insect food web kept returning me to the same insight: it is the interconnectedness that matters, not any single species in isolation. The fringe tree understands this. It is not one thing. It is a system.
— Come April through June, the white fringed blooms open — long, thread-like petals cascading like an old man's beard in a coastal breeze. For native bees and butterflies, this is a critical nectar window early in the season when little else is offering.
— The fringe tree is a larval host for three sphinx moth species: the Rustic Sphinx (Manduca rustica), the Waved Sphinx, and the Fawn Sphinx. A host plant is not ornamental. It is food infrastructure. Without it, these moths cannot complete their life cycle — and the food web unravels further up.
— Female trees produce dark blue, olive-like fruits in late summer and fall — high-fat fuel for migrating songbirds like Northern Cardinals and Eastern Bluebirds, and for small mammals preparing for winter. The timing is not accidental. It is evolution's precision.
— Their dense, multi-stemmed structure creates cover and nesting opportunities for birds — not just food, but shelter. In a landscape of turf and boxwoods, this structure is nearly impossible to find.
— At Sequel's entrance, where clay soil meets the stone path, their roots hold the ground and move water downward — the same function I have been studying since I first understood how roots cool this planet and absorb what Houston cannot stop flooding with.
A threshold is a sculpture
Carbon By The Yard - Lawndale 2021
I have always been interested in the sculpture of transition — the moment between one state and another. When I carved Carbon by the Yard into Lawndale's turf, the gesture was simple: carve a shape, let the grass grow around it. The relief emerged from contrast. What was taken away revealed what was possible.
The two fringe trees at Sequel's entrance work the same way. They mark the passage from the manicured urban world outside into the living, breathing, intentionally ecological world within the sculpture. They are the frame. They are also the argument — that two feet of native species, one year old, already threading itself into the insect food web, is doing more ecological work than turf and non-natives could do in a decade.
Allan Savory has said that artists and writers must create the visual images of change — that science alone cannot carry us there.
I believe that. I also believe the most important images of change are sometimes the quietest ones. Two small trees on either side of a stone path. White fringed blooms in a coastal breeze. A living sculpture that begins before you know it has.
They are a year old. In twenty years they will be twenty feet tall — cascading white each April, fruiting each September, hosting moths, sheltering songbirds, holding the ground. Sequel will have grown up around them. That is the whole conversation.