Nature Framed | Home Is Where the Heart Is

Home is where the heart is

I created 'Home Is Where the Heart Is', with botanical bits and bobs that I stumbled on when going on my daily walks. The foraged pieces are temporarily arranged on a black backdrop... just long enough for me to snap this picture. Then the slate is wiped clean...ready for me to start all over again, creating something new.

Believe it or not, all the leaves are dried to a crisp! Before I started paying closer attention to nature, I equated dry leaves with just one color- brown! 

However, it turns out leaves do dry up into colors others than brown. Look how beautifully these dried leaves have retained their vibrant colors.

The moon is made from dry gingko leaves arranged in a circle.

The red leaves (left of and behind the house) were pressed out between pages of a heavy book, so that they dried nice and flat.

The feathery red leaves (right of house) are Japanese Maple leaves that dried up and curled up naturally on the tree.

And the house is created from remnants of tree bark. If you look closely, you can see moss between the crevices of the bark.

The smoke is created from wind-dispersed silky seeds from the pods of the Butterfly milkweed plant (Asclepias tuberosa). It was fun working with these wispy seeds, but I had to hold my breath around them. They are so light that even the slightest movement around them was enough to make them float away.

The door knob is a desiccated berry from the Pokeweed (Phytolacca americana). This brilliant purplish-red berry is plump and juicy in it's hey day, but it shriveled up into the perfect little door knob for my composition.

My favorite element in this picture are the stars. Once pale violet blue smooth aster flowers (Aster laevis), these flowers dried up on the plant into clusters of tiny white crispy flowers, perfect to use as stars in the dark night sky. And how appropriate too, since aster means 'star' in Latin.

 "Study the face of nature and you will never be bored".

                    - Ruskin Bond 

To see more photographs from my "Nature Framed Series", click on Captures below.