Maybe this isn’t a very interesting post, lol, but it’s what I’m doing today. It’s yard-work day. All week is supposed to be rain-free, so the whole week is outdoor work-week. With all the rains we’ve had, the grass is growing fast. Mostly weeds, but some grass, too. We have very little flat ground and too many rocks for mowing with a riding mower. There is a little area that I could use a push mower, but that mower is broken. So it’s all weed-eating work for now. We have two weedeaters. One with string and another with a blade.
Thankfully, I’m getting around to this chore before I need the blade anywhere near the house. I do need the blade along the fence lines already in the horse’s pasture, though.
Nursery Work
Yesterday and the day before was Ginseng Nursery work days. The seedlings are coming in good now and I had someone come over on Sunday to help with potting. That’s a tremendous help, especially when the person doing it has a gentle touch with the fragile seedlings. Did you know that Wild Ozark is the only certified ginseng nursery in Arkansas?
It’s a very small operation, but it gives anyone within driving distance a place to come pick up seedlings of ginseng and some of the other companion plants that I propagate here at the nursery. The nursery is also a habitat garden, so those interested can come see the ginseng growing in a natural setting with the habitat companions. And they also get to see some of the most common look-alikes right there where they can also see the ginseng.
Yard Work Exhaustion
When I’m busy doing the garden and yard work, I don’t have time (or energy) to make art. But I do get a lot of inspiration, especially while working in the habitat garden. I painted a ginseng plant the other day. Just a quick sketch, and one day I’ll do a better one. I want to do a series of the woodland plants including ginseng and the plants that live in that same habitat.
Wild ginger is on that list. I got some good pictures of that plant while it was blooming the other day.
And the Showy orchid is probably blooming right now, too. I need to go on a little hike to take a look at it. That plant is hard to find out here, but I know where one little colony has set up house in a spot not too hard to reach. I’ll add a photo here if I get out there today and it is still blooming, or even still there.
So, I’d like to add the orchids of Wild Ozark to that list of plants I will paint. I’ve already painted the Showy. We have several native orchids here, though I haven’t found many of the others recently. I think today would be a good day, now that I’ve worn myself out with weed-eating and yard-work, to go see what the orchids I do know where to find out here have been doing.
.
Author/Artist Info
________________________________
Madison Woods is a self-taught artist who moved to the Ozarks from south Louisiana in 2005. In 2018 she began experimenting with watercolor painting, using her local pigments. She calls them Paleo Paints. In 2023 she began her journey into the world of oil painting with those same pigments. Her paintings of the Ozark-inspired scenes feature exclusively the lightfast pigments foraged from Madison county, Arkansas. Her inspiration is nature – the beauty, and the inherent cycle of life and death, destruction and regeneration. Wild Ozark is also the only licensed ginseng nursery in Arkansas. Here’s the link for more information on the nursery end of life out here.
Online Portfolio
Click here to join her mailing list.
LIKE & SUBSCRIBE ON YOUTUBE
https://www.youtube.com/@wildozark
I enjoyed reading about your “real” day. Mine generally aren’t exciting either but if I get a lot done, I’m happy. 🙂
Thanks, Janet 😀 I’m STILL doing yardwork. It’s going to take me all week. I just hope by the end of it, it’s not time to start over again 🙁 When we first moved here, I only had to mow a few times a summer. Now it seems like it rains so much that it’s just like it used to be in Louisiana before I moved here… almost tropical now. I see some areas are having a bad drought, though, so I should be grateful, I suppose.
I wish you could send rain here or anywhere else in the West. We’re well into drought years and the repercussions might start getting much more difficult this year.
I wish I could too. My SIL in southwest TX needs rain badly, too. They have no hay for cattle out there and everyone is having to buy feed.
And that gets expensive!!