flowerwild workshop

　　

　　
　　
　　as you may have guessed from the lack of posts lately...we've been busy. (like hanging these insane floral "clouds" from the ceiling of an old hog barn. whose crazy idea was that???) next time i will definitely consider the "how" before I blurt out an untested creative zinger like that! big thanks to my honey-pie for listening to all of my "pie in the sky" ideas and ramblings on this (balloons covered in petals, styrofoam forms with layers of tubed hydrangea wrapped around them, etc) and then figuring out how to engineer their installation. you are a patient and sweet man!
tomorrow I'm kind of, or mostly on my way to my good friend Jose Villa's workshop in Los Olivos. Nevermind my car died an hour ago - and I'm not in LA. but, thanks to the good will ambassador of flowerwild (ambassador of happiness and all things positive (amber moon)) it looks like Jose will get his flowers and some other goodies.
which brings me to something else. many of you have been asking about our next workshop. and i haven't planned dates yet, or locations. So though I would ask you all. when and where would you like to see flowerwild workshops?
considering first and last weeks of november, and other dates in Jan and feb!

Physicists study lily blossoms

How do flowers bloom? Physicists at Harvard have applied numbers to flowers and found a mathematical formula as well as explanation for why a lily's petals open outward to reveal the bloom within, according to ScienceNews.org.
L. Mahadevan, a physicist who also discovered how the Venus flytrap snaps shut, published findings along with coauthor Haiyi Liang, in the March 21 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The scientists studied asiatic lilies - Lilium casablanca - in the process of blooming and tried to explain why petals curve outward as opposed to inward.
According to Discovery News, some of the earlier explanations for flower blossoms included models involving the midrib - or center vertical line - of each petal.
Mahadevan and his colleagues believe that the driving forces are more along the edges of flower petals.
To prove this, they surgically removed the edges of lilies and found that the outward curls changed, becoming less pronounced.
The team also explains blossoms in terms of "instabilities" in plant cells, according to ScienceNews. Such instabilities arise when some cells become longer than others and begin to strain the edges of flowers. Any flower lover has observed this process at the sight of ruffles along the edges of petals and sepals.
“Because it’s only growing at the edge and not the middle, you get a mismatch of strain," Skotheim told the news source.
To further follow the growth of each flower, Liang and Mahadevan drew dots on the buds of unopened lilies and proceeded to videotape the flowers' growth.
Journalist Tim Wall of Discovery News quotes several writers who may have intuited the process of flower blossoms long before the new publication in PNAS.
"It is at the edge of a petal that love waits," said William Carlos Williams. Similarly, Anais Nin seemed to believe that flower blossoming didn't originate from the center of the bud. "The risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom," wrote Nin.
Mathematicians have used numbers to study and quantify the nature of other plants. The phenomenon of grass blades turning away from the sun has been explained through math.
“Infusing a scientific aesthetic into a thing of beauty only enhances our appreciation of it. This is what we try to do as scientists," Mahadevan told ScienceNews.