05 Jan Monday…with floating seeds

Some of you may remember that back in August I collected some Ornamental Artichoke heads which had been uprooted from my local park ( you can see about it here )…

The idea was to dry them out and possibly collect seeds from them… I had sort of forgotten about them, as they’d been in my shed all Autumn, and hadn’t noticed how they’d morphed into dried golden heads… To be honest, I didn’t relish the idea of pulling them apart to look for the seeds as the heads are tough and quite spiky, and this one was certainly heading towards being chucked in the fire, but I just thought I’d have a look anyway……and then out came these big seeds!

I set about pulling it apart and collecting the seeds in a bowl, and when I looked at the table a few minutes later, it was completely covered in these giant ‘seed carriers’…

I had found them in August; too early for the large head to open up and the seeds naturally fly away, so instead they were now doing it inside my house… The hoover has now devoured most of them, but I did take some time-lapse videos which you can see here:

1. slow fall

2. Slow Opening

3. Opening Up

( there’s also a Steller Story here )

One of the problems, and joys, of being an artist is distraction…a simple job turned into hours of playing with seeds; so no tidying, no planning, no e-mails, not really anything constructive today yet, so I better get on!