One Year Old, Two Feet Tall and Already Working.

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 eastern tree is thriving. It gets full sun. The western tree is the smallest — shaded by other small plants that block its access to full sun. It should eventually outgrow them.

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.

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.

The walkway features the two one-year-old trees, barely visible, standing 10 feet away from the center.

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.

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. A host plant is not ornamental. It is food infrastructure. Female trees produce dark blue olive-like fruits in late summer — high-fat fuel for migrating songbirds. Their dense multi-stemmed structure creates cover and nesting opportunities for birds. And their roots hold the clay soil at Sequel’s entrance, moving 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 close-up of the trees soft, airy beard.

A threshold is a sculpture.

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.

Carbon By The Yard - Lawndale 2021

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. 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.

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.

The Tyranny of Tidy

In Defense of the Uninvited — Part II

There is a particular kind of anxiety that lives at the edge of an unmowed lawn. You can feel it from the sidewalk — the low-grade disapproval radiating off a neighbor’s glance, the HOA letter with its careful language about community standards and property values. We all know this pressure. Many of us have bent to it.

I feel it too. At my own eco-art studio, volunteer plants have started pushing up through the gravel parking lot this spring. In modern aesthetic terms, it looks unkempt. Do I groom it because that is what looks cared for to the human eye — or do I do what I preach? If I did clean it up, how? I won’t use pesticides. Pulling is more work than I can manage. I could burn them with a torch, which releases carbon — leaving the lot neat but barren. I know that option well. It’s what I did all last summer. I feel the pull of it still.

That question — how much tidiness do we owe society before we’re allowed to let something live — is exactly what this essay is about.

The ancient part of your brain that kept your ancestors alive is genuinely afraid of the tall grass. It is scanning for the snake, the bobcat, the thing with teeth. That instinct is old. It is wired in. The impulse to clear, to see, to know what’s out there — it kept people alive across tens of thousands of years. We are not wrong to have it.

But we are living in a different world now, and that old circuitry is misfiring.

Here is what the science shows: living plant systems — their moisture, their transpiration, their cooling and breathing — help move weather across the landscape. Strip those systems out and replace them with hot pavement and monoculture lawn, and you remove the very mechanisms that keep weather moving. Extreme weather increasingly gets stuck. Heat domes park over cities for days, fed not just by hot pavement but by the barren heat radiating off bare ground and fallow fields. The fires. The floods. The Guadalupe on the Fourth of July. Hurricane Harvey. We call these natural disasters — as if nature did this to us, unprovoked.

The danger is no longer the rattlesnake in the grass. The danger is the bare ground.

I know this in my body now — not just my brain. Standing in my parking lot, looking at the volunteers pushing through the gravel, I no longer see a mess. I see first responders. The plants that show up uninvited are the ones that know what the ground needs — to be covered, held, cooled, fed. They are doing the work we stopped doing when we picked up the leaf blower and the herbicide.

What would it take to shift not just individual behavior but the aesthetic itself — to make living, layered, uninvited-welcoming landscapes look like what they actually are: acts of intelligence? Acts of care?

The weeds already know what to do. The seeds are in the soil, waiting. Life is not asking permission. It is ready to come back the moment we stop yanking it out.

The question isn’t whether the land can recover. The question is whether we can — from the idea that control is the same thing as care. That bare is the same thing as clean.

The greatest threat we face isn’t what’s hiding in the weeds. It’s that we cut them all down.

Generational Amnesia and Regeneration.

My husband Curtis and I drove to Christoval, Texas for a public hummingbird tagging event. I had been to a private tagging before, but this one was different. The public was invited in. Children were there.

Biologists carefully capture tiny hummingbirds to collect vital information — sex, age, length, weight. After gathering the data, a skilled volunteer carefully cradles each delicate bird in the palm of an observer’s hand.

The tiny creature briefly pauses. You hold your breath. You feel an almost mechanical vibration, like a toy stuck in the “on” position — the rhythm of its heartbeat. Then, in an instant, it is back into the wild.

It wasn’t until I looked at my photos afterward that I saw it — a trusted volunteer placing the bird in a child’s hand. The transfer of knowledge, right there in the frame. A tiny beating heart. A child holding their breath.

That moment — the exchange of a tiny life from seasoned hands to smooth palms — is a living metaphor for what it means to nurture the passing of knowledge and care across generations. It is the story of regeneration.

This is what generational amnesia looks like in reverse.

Generational amnesia — also called shifting baseline syndrome — describes how each generation views the environment they inherit as the normal standard, even if it is significantly more degraded than that of previous generations. We absorb the world we are born into. We mistake it for the world as it is.

In the 1980s in Houston, our garden was filled with hummingbirds. Their vibrant presence shaped our daily conversations, our sense of place, our sense of wonder. They were part of our love story. Curtis proposed and hummingbirds were there. We miss them.

Today’s children in Houston have likely never seen one in a garden. They have no baseline for what’s missing. And that is the whole loss — not just the hummingbirds, but the memory of them.

Breaking this cycle requires hands willing to reach out and moments prepared to receive. It demands nurturing curiosity, empathy, and attention in children and adults alike. It calls for the deliberate passing on of more than just facts — but also the emotions and experiences that bind us to the world beyond ourselves.

The hummingbird’s pause in the palm of a stranger’s hand is brief. But it is enough. This is how we pass down the endangered knowledge of our natural history now — not around a campfire, not through a grandmother’s photo album, but in a field in Christoval, Texas, with a tiny beating heart in your hand and a trusted volunteer saying: this existed. Pay attention


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Echoes of Existence-how to engage the students

I am slowly working to find solutions to the problems that will arise when the students implement the installation.

First, how to get students that are not comfortable with nature to want tobe involved. What will draw them in?

Second, a big problem is how to control a group of college kids in a field and have them complete a detailed installation.

Bloomington is a walking city. Every day as I would walk about town and the campus I worried about how I was going to solve these two problem. And like on most college campuses everyone is in their own audio visual world contained between the ear pieces of a headset. And I was the same. The difference was I still wanted to connect to those passing by me with a “good morning” or hi. I found the IU students were very focused on the sounds in their headsets they did not need to make eye contact or say hello.

In a discussion with an English professor, Shannon Gayk, who also teaches a walking class, I learned that a novel idea for students is silent walking. The idea of walking without a headset without sound — silent.

Thinking of headsets and silent - my mind went straight to silent raves then to a silent installation.

Would the concept of a silent installation draw the students in. Could this commitment to headsets be a possible tool for crowd control during the installation?

I love the idea. But that leads to another hurdle. How do I design a silent installation? What technology makes this possible?

With a quick Google search, I found several companies that provide everything you need for a silent event.

Heat Dome

“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.”

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Heat Dome

Watercolor monotype

30" X44"

Bare ground, concrete, asphalt, and astroturf emit 4X radiant heat. Great masses of radiant heat create heat domes. Heat domes prohibit weather from moving across the land. In contrast, surfaces covered in thick layers of plants indigenous to the region store water in the soil. When the day warms, the plants transpire, releasing bacteria with the moisture to form clouds that provide shade and then rain. We each need to carry our ecological weight. We can start by considering new ways to surface our city scapes to cool the planet.

Heat Dome ghost