Earth Art - can you dig it?

  

 

Reader-sleuths of this blog will know that when I start writing about Earth Art, it means I haven't met my personal deadline for two paintings a month.  But there's cool stuff to behold here and lots of pictures – even if you might already have seen some of them. And this post continues the story I'd hinted at in August.

 

The title photo is "My Deepest Dig for Buried Treasure" – the last mighty trowel-dug hole in my Summer 2021 Rooting Around project. The shovel is there just for scale because the ground all across this part of Vancouver is glacial till – hardpan, some seams of tough clay, and pebbles, stones, rocks of all sizes.  I could only accomplish my awesome feat (applause, please) by getting down and dirty – kneeling on the ground, forcefully digging in with my trusty sharp 20-year-old trowel.

 

I hadn't expected this when my back yard jungle began to flourish in May.

 

But by July, it was evident that the jungle was being overrun with far-flung shoots from my cherished Rosa nutkana, the Pacific Coast's wild rose that's been in our family since the early 1980s. 

  

 

The rosy-red arrows give an idea of what faced me.

 

And as I knew, even before trowel hit ground, where there are shoots, there must be roots – and lots of them, some travelling out as far as 15 feet from the parent plant.

 

 

It wasn't long before I realized that a total upheaval of this quadrant of my small back yard was required.

 

This task took me from mid-July, through heat waves and smoke, to mid-October. I'd have made more progress except the quadrant includes Linus' Place in the Sun.  He's my next-door neighbour's aging cat, in camouflage here after he adopted one of my weeding buckets and a random chunk of concrete as THE perfect patio furniture.

 

When I was able to beat Linus to the Back Forty, I was sometimes rewarded with treasures that lurk below the surface.  I forgot to mention that the ground here also yields random bits of person-made stuff.  My neighbours and I guess that some of it goes back to when our houses were originally built (1912 to the mid-20's) and then to whenever it was (1950's-60's?) that the newer buildings across the laneway were built and perhaps our yards verged on their construction dumping ground.

 

I love the funky old rusty bits, including the nails that always remind me of Giacometti sculptures  – see  his "Standing Woman" as an example.

 

Of course, I can get totally absorbed in the beauty of even the smallest pebbles.  This stone, about the size of an egg, is one of the most intriguing I've ever seen – with what was once a magic bubbling brew intruding into more solid dark igneous rock.

 

 

And then there are the combinations of natural and person-made objects.  Look at this grape-sized blue-striped pebble in a chunk of concrete:

 

 

And my *great find* of the whole project:-- "Mud Duck", sitting here on top of an upended small pill bottle.  He's scarcely bigger than a walnut.

 

There was also a late-breaking dark surprise – errant BAMBOO ROOTS, where I hadn't expected to find them!  You're thinking it, aren't you? ….that I might be rooting around again in Summer 2022, searching out Fargesia nitida.  (If I don't say its name, it won't happen….?)

 

I would have become demoralized if that very day I hadn't at last worked my way to the root of the Mother Plant. 

 

The next day, I made a point of proudly showing it to every last neighbour on my block.  Linus' dad, an Indigenous construction worker with a quick wit and dry sense of humour said, "You know, you REALLY need to start a Facebook group." 

 

With the root extracted, I could begin to reconstruct the scene of the crime.  Approaching the finish line, I placed the largest of my excavated rocks in the front row.

 

And here, as of October 13^th, is the Grand Finale – as far as I'll go this season.  By the way, I rooted cuttings of the cherished Rosa nutkana in a big pot which is now installed several feet above ground in the green container by the fence. Before long, it will be hidden behind some shrubs I'd had to cut back and have now relocated.  I've trimmed as many shoots and rootlets from the Mother Root as I can, and I'm leaving it outside to weather – it makes quite a gorgeous objet d'art  – more Brancusi than Giacometti.

 

The garden site has been put to bed – and so has Mud Duck, who found a compatible nest on my dining table.   He's dropped off to sleep to the mantra, "A rose is a root is a rose."