My dog’s favorite greenspace, to walk in everyday, runs along Hominy Creek here in Asheville, where we now live. I am guessing that the intention is to keep this park in its natively “wild” state. The bushes, trees, flowering plants appear chaotic in their massively intertwined thickets of green, and they create a backdrop for many varieties of tiny flowers. This fall, they really caught my attention.
My poor dog. Every few yards I would make her stop and “hold still” while I snatched a “few” photos. I quickly acquired a thousand plus images before the temperature shifted and left the greenspace more brown and decaying as a prelude to winter.
Most of the flowers are tiny, geometric and the honeybees are everywhere. Except for one variety of fruiting bushes that really caught my eye, loaded with dangling purplish-black berries on reddish pink stems, that seemed to be everywhere! The berries are so perfect in such a wild mess of green. I decided to paint them first.
Yes, I’m shifting from painting Goddesses for a moment, to paint wild flowers. It turns out this plant is called ‘The American Pokeweed’ phytolacca americana. It grows in southern states. It is a very aggressive self-seeding plant that warns of its toxicity. This brought to mind an old song titled ‘Poke Salad Annie’ about a poor girl meaner than an allegator who picked enough pokeweed to cook every night. (1970 sung by swamp rock artist Tony Joe White and later Elvis Presley.) AI says the berries, roots, red stems and branches are deadly, but one might possibly cook tender new leaves in the spring and not die!!!
Looking at the photo I used to paint from, I wondered, what brave critter has been eating the leaves? The poisonous berries hang perfect and untouched. When they drop and re-seed, they go unhindered and uneaten to populate and dominate most of the desirable landscape along the creek banks.
I’ve limited myself to acrylic paint during all the moving I’ve done over the past three years. I switched to oils on this painting. Maybe because of the lushness of all the greenery. I don’t know. I included oil based neon paint and topped it off by noodling with oil pastels on top. It is now on to painting some of the other tiny flowers.
