Sneaking Plants Into Work
On native plants weaving their tangly roots into graphic design stuff
I really held myself back in yesterday’s newsletter. Oh the lists of visiting creatures, large and teeny tiny, I wanted to include! Eastern glass lizards, woolly bear caterpillars, yellow-collared scape moths, migrating orioles, possums, raccoons, toads of some kind or another.… the list goes on, especially ornithologically. 🤓 I could have filled your inbox with 1000+ iphone photos of the same floofs of goldenrod. Thousands more of every plant in the yard, ahem ~80 different species from this region! (Probably not brag worthy to a master naturalist, but I’m getting there.)
These plants end up reseeding themselves into other areas of life the more time I sit amongst them. Like work stuff!
Segue to work stuff.
I dove into the branding for Patagonia’s flagship in Charlotte in a previous Substack. Every detail revolved around plants and animals native to the Carolinas, so I frequented our yard often to sketch. Here are a couple of other projects I’ve worked on recently, which just so happen to feature plants from my yard, and perhaps a few insects!
The M.A.R.S.H. Project (Briefly)
The M.A.R.S.H. Project is a passion project I share with two other co-founding compadres,
and Dr. Blake Scott. As I mentioned yesterday… there is more to come on T.M.P. in the coming weeks. We have three years of events and design to catch you up on, dear readers.All of the money we receive, in the form of generous donations, go toward plants in the ground, hydrology plans, and cost of materials to throw our events, which are free to the public. This translates to unpaid for the three of us (𝒶 𝓁𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓇 𝑜𝒻 𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒), so I like to use T.M.P. as a place to explore and experiment in design.
Edmund’s Oast Brewing Co.
To date The M.A.R.S.H. Project has released three beers with Edmund’s Oast Brewing. For the past ten years, I’ve designed more than 275 beer labels with Edmund’s, and I threw an audible asking Cameron Read (Head Brewer/Director/Partner/EtcEtc) if he’d consider brewing a beer for us highlighting edible native plants. Our first Marsh Brew featured Yaupon, the only caffeinated plant native to North America. We immersed this 16 oz. can with information for drinkers to educate themselves with, throughout the night.
Our second beer was brewed with Goldenrod gathered in South Carolina by Celebrating Earth, who creates the most magnificent wreaths. This brew followed the more established format I set up for the Edmund’s Oast labels, featuring a collaged engraving and a litttttle less type, but we still geeked out:
The beautiful Goldenrod is a keystone species, meaning it is critical to our ecosystem. Our hero, Dr. Doug Tallamy notes that it supports 115 butterfly and moth species on the U.S. East Coast, over 11 native bee species, and provides essential nectar to fuel migrating monarchs in the fall. Even in winter, songbirds feed on its seed heads.
Marsh Brew No. 2
Outer Surf
Our backyard has a beautiful Swamp Rose Mallow that we brought back from a nursery in Nags Head, NC. You can spot these beauties dotting the coastal plains and swampy forest edges of the Carolinas. (I’m actually surprised by how well it is doing in our yard.) After they bloom they curl themselves back up for the night and we often find bumblebees tucked away in a petaled sleeping bag. This shirt design was drawn for one of our favorite shops in Nags Head, and although it didn’t make the final cut, I still love it. We rolled with something-a-little-more-oceany for this project.
Nimble Garden Co.
This was a short-lived venture, but I had a lot of fun working on the illustrations. Originally this company offered a solution for aspiring gardeners, overwhelmed by the fun of picking out their season’s seeds. Nimble set out to produce and distribute ready-made garden kits to cut down on decision-making.
The kits were designed with a variety of seeds sealed in substrate inside of biodegradable cells. Essentially a garden would arrive in the mail ready to transplant! All you needed to add was water.
The Flowering Kind
Peachey Trudell grows an abundance of beautiful flowers on James Island and was looking for some minimalist florals that took inspiration from quilting. Inspired by our Baptisia Alba, in all of its legumish forms and angles, we created three little floral shapes to pattern and stack into quilted meadows. Mind you, the colors are not Baptisia-y.
Coming Up
Inspired by our climbing American Wisteria, Wisteria frutescens. (This project just started, so we’ll see what sticks.
Raindrops on Roses
These are a few of my favorite things this week.
I jumped in on my first native plant rescue last weekend. I’ve been wanting to do this for some time, since learning about the Native Plant Rescue Squad, in Tennessee. I had a last-minute invite to a site near Charleston; this little rescue took place on a new development that has been clearing a Longleaf pine savanna. This type of ecosystem contains some of the world’s most diverse plant communities! We’re trying to discuss how to make this sort of opportunity more accessible, without upsetting crew workers with a bunch of rescuers in the way.
Yoink! A bulb of Liatris that was being crushed by gravel: RESCUED. GRIT Bakery. Charleston folks: If you haven’t been to GRIT, you’re missing out on the best sourdough loaves and baguettes in town. Note: I did not have the pleasure of designing this stuff, but that will not keep me from arriving every Wednesday morning when the baguettes come out of the oven.
