Leaves and Light: Sunprints of American Native Plants

Since we imagine something intentional about a community both in its formation and its function as a new entity, there is something both baffling and attractive about the idea of a “plant community.” Do plants know what they’re doing? Some claim our attention: good to eat, good to smell, get stuck to your clothes. For a majority, plants or plant communities arouse a restricted admiration: lawn. A lawn can be a plant community, an atrocious one to be sure. But I’m thinking of plant communities in the eyes of God, where the plants foregather in ancient times and set out toward infinity. These deserve the word community, and the individuals who make them up are original in the extreme, as they must be: they live in a tough town. It is our luck that the eternal aspects of these daredevils have fallen to the eye of artist Lindy Smith who has used the sun in ways known best to her to reveal the souls of plants as lives, as archetypes, as semaphore. Their shapes seem to belong to dreams while for all their unexpectedness they are no more accidental than dreams. What we see emerges from the lives they’ve lived in deep time; their importance hangs over them as an aura.  We long to say their names: milkweed, mullein, bulrush, fescue, rush, yarrow. Or, on the other hand, sumpweed, pigweed, spurge. They belong to the things we see for the first time while recognizing we’ve known them always, hence the longing to absorb their eternal forms. Creation—we have it by our fingertips, just. Smith’s images Smith has discovered the souls of so many plants I thought I knew and left their essential signatures on my mind that I will never see them in the same way again, or more to the point, forget them again. I wish I knew enough about the process to understand what help the sun has been in finding these plants out. But here they are, seen by an artist, and what help it is.—from the Preface by Tom McGuane