Garden of Fractal Plants

FORAGING

A bloom from the desert out west.
A green feather from Isabella’s.
A seedpod from glaciated ground.
Clippings from an evergreen.
Grass like a fox’s tail.
A branch of pine.
The dregs of a tea reading.
A handful of hibiscus.
Rosebuds.
Strands of yellow.

Each object carries a story,
the meeting between plant and person and place.

CONJURING

*light the candle*

Gather close
as those might in a séance.

Take up the brush.
Brush back and forth.
Brush and let the paper and pulp saturate yellow.

Lay the plant upon the page and
call forth the artificial sun.
Wait.
Watch.
Yellow darkens to bronzen blue.
Shadows bleed white and press themselves to the page.

Submerge. Agitate. Rinse.
Phantoms emerge from photogenic blue.

From these ghosts, listen to their calling,
Making marks—
elongating into stems and roots,
morphing into leaves, buds, flowers, fruits.

We circle.
Once, again, then eight times.
Ink. Pigment. Wax.
One fairy,
four butterflies,
twenty bulbs,
thirty-two blooms—
one after another, the fractal takes shape.
Neither flower, nor weed—
A hybrid plant of becoming.

*blow out candle*

FABULATING

In the thousandth year of drought, bulbs uncoil towards a single droplet of water,

From their spirals, star-shaped flowers bloom,
morphing into butterflies, dancing their brief lives in scorched air.

At the spring ceremony, the community harvests the butterfly fruit, pink crescents

to scatter around the stump of a sacred tree, home to a fairy, once
Above blooms the water blossom, thickening liquid to jelly,

feeding a fire-breathing weed,

where a new flower can emerge from the ashes.

This is the myth of a fractal plant. Conjured from fragments, inconsistencies, glitches, patches, and disturbance. Gathering scattered matter. Found flora collected by hand. Sun prints. Tarot cards turned over one by one. Scrolls of exquisite corpses. Blender magic. Disjointed words strung into sentences like beads on a cord. Voices over voices over voices.

The plant is not created once or thrice; it assembles petal by petal, line by line, leaf and letter appearing in sequence. In increments. By polyphony. Worlds are made with words.

We care about what buds bud buds. What seeds seed seeds. The fractal plant breeds ways of knowing that are partial, situated, and relational. It photosynthesizes, reproduces, fruits, disperses in the wind.

Exhale.

Release.

The story moves on.

The fractal plant was brought into being by fourteen collaborators at the Harvard Graduate School of Design during a J-term course titled Abracadabra Botanica: Crafting with Plants.