Botanical

“It was told, I never actually knew it at the time, that Finn, as a young man, read Thoreau’s “On Walden Pond.” As did I. I remember very little of it now. Evidently the reading of it lit him up. It opened up something in his psyche. I do remember talking with another friend back then and he told me that he had seen Finn working on a window air conditioning unit in his backyard. It appears that after reading the book he decided he was going to become self-sufficient, repair his own stuff. I don’t remember how much success he had with all that. What I do remember is around that time, in our late teens and twenties, he most certainly looked at the natural world differently, especially the plant world.

Prior to his awakening I think he saw the flora around us, as did I, as a great big green and grey and umber thing. Nothing really separate, distinct from the rest. This most likely came from us growing up in the dense pine forests of East Texas. After, he became excited, connected, almost obsessed with each individual plant and what its uses were. He studied books on local botany. He sought out locals that knew about natural cures. He befriended an old Coushatta woman that was an encyclopedia of the local woodlands and the uses of all the plants; as food, medicine, or otherwise. He collected old food boxes and cans with graphics that portrayed plants. He hung a series of unfortunate, not purposely expressionistic paintings of local plants and trees, done by his sister, on the walls of his apartment. He became, almost entirely, a carnivore..

Finn and I are old men now. He raised three kids. I raised five. He became a professor of Biology. I ran a lawn irrigation business. We’ve played golf almost once a week for over forty years. If he leaves this place before I do, the one thing that I will make sure everyone knows about him is, “The True Taxonomy of The Flora of East Texas,” a self-illustrated four-and one-half inch thick book created by him over thirty years. He renamed every tree and plant in the Big Thicket of Texas and listed all that he had discovered about the tree or plant. One example of his handiwork is a color drawing of the leaves of the native sassafras tree, Sassafras albidum, which he renamed, “Affable dinosaur foot.” I tried to get him to publish it over the years. I volunteered to be his agent. We could have gotten rich. Not really, but he could have been known…” From “The Man That Gave Them Names” By Franklin Cincinnatus.

JUROR | Lee Anne White will be the juror for “botanical”. Lee Anne is a photographer whose work is rooted in the landscape. She creates intimate portraits of place—the terrain, what grows there, the history of the land and our relationship to place. Working in the studio as well as the field and garden, she also creates still life photographs of plants, seedpods and found objects..

She has exhibited her work in both solo and juried exhibitions, is the recipient of three Julia Margaret Cameron Awards, and has 30 photographs on permanent display at Brenau University. An instructor for 25 years, she has taught at Maine Media Workshops, Santa Fe Workshops, Chicago Botanic Garden, Madeline Island School of the Arts and through her own online program..

She previously served as editor-in-chief of Fine Gardening magazine, photographed more than 70 magazine features, and produced nearly 20 books on garden design and landscape architecture. She has a master’s degree in Creative Studies from the State University of New York/Buffalo State and an undergraduate degree from The Women’s College at Brenau University.