soil

The title is from this Langston Hughes poem.

Grasses are sensual. You can smell them and hear them and watch them move. Meadows are sexy, just like lovers they never stop changing, never ceasing to surprise.

John Greenlee

That sensuousness can be seen in the way grass moves in the breeze. How it blooms robust with color in the spring and goes dormant brown in the winter: As Greenlee might say, they're the essence of sex and death.

Grass is dynamic. It gives texture and balance, it can be sharp or fluffly. It's an ensemble player, a backgrounder, accompanist, or virtuoso soloist if need be. Its culturally polyglot: It's Asia, Africa, the Mediterranean, and the American heartland. It's tropical, jungle, desert, lush, dry, sparse, and dense.

Below, the work of Washington D.C. based James Van Sweden:

Layers:

Meadows:

In contemporary gardens, it is the quintessential modern material.

More James Van Sweden:

It works in the meadow; it works in a pot:

Piet Oudolf's Trenthan Gardens:

A composition with decompostion: The O Horizon

“Earth laughs in flowers.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Through tattered clothes small vices do appear; Robes and fur'd gowns hide them all.”
- Shakespeare

"I kiss the soil as if I placed a kiss on the hands of a mother..." - Pope John Paul II

“The original sources of all wealth: The soil and the laborer.” - Karl Marx