Wisteria / Hello Spring

I wanted to write this post weeks ago, here it is after some delay. It is still spring as I write so that is a win!

I have wanted to make watercolour paint from wisteria petals for about a year, just had to wait until the next time our wisteria was in bloom. We have a beautiful wisteria plant down one end of our porch. When it first blooms, I feel happy just looking at it.

I crushed some petals in a mortar and pestle, added hot water, and applied to paper. On application it looks almost clear and later dries to a bluish purple hue. Very strange. It bleeds through paper also, even thick paper. It seems to have its own properties. I love materials that behave unpredictably even though it makes them more difficult to work with. It reminds me of working with myself. “High success, high failure,” my friend K said a few days ago about one of the methods in her art practice.

The watercolour didn’t last long, about four days in a jar. After that it started to smell, like the rotten water in a vase of wilted roses.

It was a fun experiment and felt like a celebration of spring and a way to get me interacting with spring and with plants generally. I have planted an herb garden at the other end of the porch near the kitchen. And we have our vege garden down below the house, wrapped in bird netting to protect it from our many chickens and the other birds that hang around. It is absolutely burgeoning with produce already. I’ve been working with the garden and my appetite to make new recipes out of our bounty. This too is satisfying and grounding during / after what has proved to be a challenging year —brutal but enriching! My friend C described her time since moving as “gentle and enlightening” which I am hoping will describe the coming year for me.

I attended a Creative Fibre market a few weekends ago, stopped in to say hi to a couple of lovely women I did the Indigo dyeing and paintmaking course with. They dye using all kinds of native plants, Old Man’s Beard, Loquat leaves & sticks, comfrey, avocado pits — all sorts! One makes beautiful socks, the other makes beautiful scarves. I wanted some of each but didn’t have much money so I just feasted with my eyes and took copious notes about what interesting things I could use for dye. When I got home, I sent my friend K a voice note while Logan sat near me in the living room. I ended the note with “there were so many exciting ways to dye”. Logan pointed it out to me afterwards. K said she appreciated it as she was newly visiting a densely populated country with a young child and was preoccupied by how many different ways there actually are to die. We share a similar sense of humour with just a touch of cynicism.

Logan has since brought me home some Old Man’s Beard and my friend J keeps offering me rose petals from old bouquets. It makes me think of the expression working harder not smarter. When you have good people around you and they know what you’re into, things sometimes arrive without any effort at all and vice versa. We have a surplus of fresh vegetables and homemade soup and eggs, occasionally a chocolate sweet potato / kumara pie or some cookies (yeah I’m kind of into baking now…) and I love being able to share food with friends. If my mom were closer she would get food too!

One of the ladies at the market wasn’t selling anything, she just had skeins and skeins of yarn she’d dyed from different native plants and all her meticulous notes in clearfiles for visitors to look through and take down notes from. She was so generous. For her it was all about the experiment and sharing her knowledge. She told me she never crushes her materials, only soaks them in hot water. Next time I perform one of these experiments, I will remember not to crush the leaves.

That’s all for now xo