Why Seeds?

A little over three years ago my oldest child was wrapping up his year of a pre-preschool program called Mom's Morning Out. It was one morning a week for them to go and play, listen to a story, do an art project and have a little snack. For me it was one morning a week to devote some one-on-one attention to my baby girl. On one of the last days of class they talked about spring, blooming flowers and growing gardens. To add the visual help to the lesson, their teachers sent home a green bean seed in a small plastic bag wrapped in a wet paper towel. Over the next week we watched it sprout and push out an ever lengthening root. Before it got too big and out of control we ran out to the garden and buried it in the freshly turned soil.

At least a year later I found myself with an opportunity to have lunch alone at one of my favorite local restaurants, The Lincoln Cafe in Mt. Vernon, Ia. http://www.foodisimportant.com/ It was early in March, I had gardening on my mind and seeds sprouting in my basement, so I took advantage of this quiet time and packed a gardening book to read.

I was reading a chapter all about the basic botany of plants and there were two insets. One was called "Seeing a Flower Really" that described the anatomy of a flower and two forms of pollination. The second inset was called "Walking with The Metamorphosis of Plants" which was a very brief description of a journey Goethe made through the Italian Alps to observe plants. In the second inset I read ". . . a seed is the contracted or essential nature of a plant that expands with water and good soil to the vegetative growth of stem and leaf, contracting again in the calyx, or outer protective cup of the flower bud. Expansion occurs again when the petals of the corolla expand and the flower opens into bloom, and the pistil and stamen expand to the produce the fertilized ovary, or fruit, of the plant within which is the completion of the cycle, the contraction of the seed."

The seed is the contracted or essential nature of a plant. My mind immediately flashed back one year to my son's sprouted seed and it just hit me. Everything around me stopped for a moment as I contemplated that passage with the image of that sprouted seed. I paid my bill and rushed home to my stash of seeds. I selected several types and threw them into plastic bag with a damp paper towel and then sat at my bench impatiently, willing them to sprout immediately. I was going to paint the seed in it's first moments of awakening and growth.

I am still fascinated with the shapes and colors of the seeds as they grow and change. I like that a person can look at the image and in one moment it can be all about the abstract quality of the image, and in the next moment it can be a real thing.