Backyard Naturalists
Taking stock of the late summer meadow – have we reached peak yellow yet?
In the coming years, you will see a lot of this meadow. It’s the view from our house, the 24/7 TV channel our windows are tuned to. I look up at the view in between each sentence I write here, sometimes even stopping mid-sentence to take a walk with my eyes.
Things are yellow today, a lot more yellow than they were last week when I took the photograph above. Since we are new here we have no idea what to expect in the weeks to come – will the yellowing continue unabated into peak fall foliage? Will the yellow fade out in favor of reds and oranges? I saw the first purple aster opening this morning so maybe purple will have its say before the fiery fall colors take over. We truly have no idea what happens next, and if that isn’t a metaphor for life, I don’t know what is.
Getting deep into the meadow for this month’s art drop was an exercise in patience, composition, color and texture study, but above all that it was also a tentative foray into becoming naturalists of our own backyard. What are some of the species who also call this land home? Asking this question is important before we nudge the meadow into becoming even more of a wildlife haven than it already is.
Some of these are native, some are invasive, some I am not sure I am identifying correctly, but it’s a start. If anyone knows better than me, feel free to correct me or question my identifications. I am mostly a meadow novice and eager to learn. It reminds me of learning to identify birds – sometimes it’s enough to just be in the ballpark with it’s a warbler before you know at a glance that it is a bay-breasted warbler.
Art Drop #16 Closes Today
This particular art drop closes tonight, September 7, at midnight EST but if you liked this hand bouquet and would like to see more of them, you can see the whole series thus far on our website. These hand bouquets don’t wilt or give you allergies so they make beautiful gifts to yourself or to others who might need my meticulous botanical compositions in their lives, so do grab a print if the art speaks to you. We once received a request to print and frame four of them as a gift for a hand physical therapist – that gift was particularly thoughtful and well-received.
Meadow Hand Bouquet, Late Summer 2024
West Stockbridge, MA, USA
by Diana Pappas
Prints of this photograph are only available through September 7, 2024, with no further production of this work for at least a year. To learn more about the paper, sizes, and pricing click the button below to visit the art drop page on our website.
While walking a local trail this morning and mulling over some of the ideas that came out of
’s excellent Escape Pod session that I attended this week, we pondered doing more with our newsletter beyond our art drops. Occasionally we have written here about other happenings (like the total solar eclipse we witnessed in Vermont) separate from our art drops and we think there’s ample opportunity to do more, create more, collaborate more, even just give older work new life. All this to say, there’s more to come…Thanks for reading – if you made it this far there’s a sweet little butterfly waiting for you in the footer.
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If you enjoy what we do here, it would mean a lot if you can support our newsletter in some way. Consider becoming a paid subscriber or perhaps make a one-off tip via Buy Me A Coffee or better yet, add some art to your space with a print from our permanent collection or an art drop. Even just recommending our newsletter to others, or liking this post, commenting, forwarding it on – it all helps and we appreciate it.
I did comment earlier what a nice addition to your great hand bouquet series, but it seems to have disappeared - all are so tenderly composed. We enjoy our bouquet print every day. S
Will be so interesting to explore your wild plants there. The fern is strange - never seen that before and unlike any here. Your yellow sorrel is poss the Upright yellow-sorrel Oxalis stricta here in UK, introduced from North America, non-native, but our native Wood-sorrel is white, the low growing one that speckles under the trees in spring. I think the grass may be a couch grass or a perennial rye. I’m wondering what you might find growing in the meadow in spring.