Agave – A Desert Lesson in Awareness

Agave, Opening

Agave, Opening © 2014 Bo Mackison

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. ~ Aldo Leopold

Before the agave blooms, it is a rosette of green spiny leaves. And then, in the middle of the green spines, a thick stem grows. It thickens and stretches, and often reaches twenty or more feet into the air, sending forth a burst of scented yellow flowers high enough to attract the pollinating bats flying in the dark desert night.

In the excited anticipation of the bloom, an occurrence that happens only once in the life of the plant, the beauty of the stalk is usually overlooked. But a close examination of the protruding stalk offers an unexpected desert gift – a multitude of colors. Yellows and oranges, peachy pinks and soft greens, and a spike of purple.

Another desert lesson in awareness and paying attention, in noticing the small things amidst the grand. The gift of the unexpected, the overlooked.

Abstract Agave – Exploration of Color and Spirit

Agave Abstact Photo on Paper Bag Paper

Agave Abstract Photo on Paper Bag Paper © 2014 Bo Mackison

Nature wears the colors of the spirit. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What happens when you use a brown paper bag as a canvas, sponge on globs of paints, then add spray paint and glitter?

You have surprisingly beautiful paper with amazing texture and color. I wondered what would happen if I printed a photograph of the delicate paper. I treated the paper with Golden’s Digital Ground, a clear ground that allowed me to run the paper bag through a printer. This was the result.

Hidden Beauty

Hidden Beauty © 2014 Bo Mackison

This is the photograph I printed on the paper, an agave manipulated in digital post processing.

What fun experimenting with paper, paint and photographs on a Sunday afternoon. Now that I’ve successfully printed a photograph on the paper bag, I’m considering all the possibilities. So many possibilities…

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Thanks to Marline Dunn for her expertise and guidance as we gathered stacks of paper bags, then added paint, water and sunshine.

What Did I See Today?

Agave Tip

Agave Tip © 2013 Bo Mackison

“Many of us have made our world so familiar that we do not see it anymore. An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?”
― John O’Donohue , from Anam Cara: A book of Celtic Wisdom  

What did I really see today?

When I’d been taking photographs for a year or so, I thought the mere act of carrying my camera and recording my days on digital media qualified me as a person who sees her world. I thought I was one up on this quest.

I spent my day looking, assessing, finding the perfect subject for a perfect photograph. I didn’t leave the memory card in the camera, or file it away on my computer. I meticulously sorted and processed the images; I shared the ones with which I felt a connection. First I shared my photos on Flickr. Eventually I printed my photographs and sent them out into my world. It was a beginning, I think it was a very good beginning.

I looked closely at my world, documented the wave of a flower’s petal, or the lines of a historic building, or sun rays streaming through a forest falling upon the soft earth.

Then I read a quote by William Carlos Williams, the well-known poet, who said he always carried a note card in his pocket, even after years of observation and years of writing a visually intense style of poetry. He had a habit of writing down “something new” he had noticed that very day.

Williams’ statement reminded me that observation should never become complacent. Simply because I take a few photos every day does not make me an observer of my world. I fulfill that call when I practice slow photography. When I sit with a subject, examine it, perhaps journal about it, even watch other people who interact with the same subject.

When I observed and then photographed the agave plant featured above, I observed not only the plant, but the microcosm surrounding it and its habitat, even its interaction with other creatures, be they insect, animal, or human.

The agave is a desert plant that is imbedded with desert lines.  The plant, with its sharp teeth and spikes, is so tightly compressed before it opens that imprints of a leaf’s outline are left on the adjoining leaves. It is a favorite of mine.

Some days, I observe not only the agaves, but also the people who stop to look at them. I listen as they comment about its sharp spike or its wicked teeth along the edges of its leaves. Only rarely does someone notice the lovely imprints of the agave’s outline on the front and back of each leaf.

Interesting.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is exploring creative photography and emotion in a  series called Desert Lines – a combination of visual lines and written lines.

Desert Agave in Bloom

Agave with Yellow Blooms

Agave with Yellow Blooms


This lovely agave, known as the Desert Agave, is also sometimes called the “century plant”. It may have seemed like a century between flowerings to the ones who originally named it, but in practice it flowers after 8 – 20 years. Although all the flowering plants die, the plants also send out offshoots of non-flowering rosettes that remain alive, ready to flower in another year. The leaves of the rosettes are armed with stiff terminal spines, not to be fooled with, though hummingbirds seem quite attracted to the flowers.

The Desert Agave is one of the more drought-tolerant of the more than 130 species of agave found in north America. It typically grows on gravely earth from south-eastern California and south-western Arizona to Baja, California and northern regions of the state of Sonora, Mexico.

The core of the plant was baked in rock-lined pits by desert-dwelling Indians to form a nutritious energy-rich staple food. Baked agave is still available in Mexican markets. I’d love to taste it.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC, living and photographing in southern Arizona. She is grateful for the opportunity to see the diversity and beauty of the Sonoran Desert and its amazing plants.

Spring in the Sonoran

Spring in the Sonoran

Spring in the Sonoran © 2012 Bo Mackison

An ordinary desert supports a much greater variety of plants than does either a forest or a prairie. ~ Elsworth Huntington

The last weeks of February mark the beginning of Spring in the Sonoran Desert near Tucson. Fewer nights will see below freezing weather, although it did snow in the higher elevations of the mountains a couple of days ago. I can still see remnants of the snow in the mountain saddles of the Santa Rita Mountains. But in the lower elevations, the average high temperatures for the days are nearing 70˚ F (about 21˚ C) and only a few nights get chilly.

The desert marigolds are out in force, especially on the south-facing slopes in the Tucson Mountains. I took the above photo featuring the marigolds plus a variety of greening desert plants at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum just west of Tucson, one of my favorite nature haunts. I’ve talked to museum staff and park rangers at nearby Saguaro National Park, and everyone is expecting a good year for the desert wildflowers.

I find my lack of experience living in the desert amusing. Last year, when I was so taken with the desert landscape, truly falling in love with the desert, I didn’t have enough experience to know that the desert was exceptionally barren. A prolonged drought plus severe cold and a hard frost in early February of 2011 kept the desert bloom to a minimum. This year, by comparison, the desert in coming alive before my eyes – trees in the riparian corridors are dressed in spring green, desert flowers are blooming, even the small shrubs and plants in the desert are leafing out.

The desert is alive with green and the flowers are blooming. And this is just the beginning. Yay!

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is admiring the beginning of spring in the desert. Perhaps the word “admiring” is a bit weak. Bo is in the throes of a love affair with Spring in the Sonoran Desert. There. That’s better.