New Work: A GREEN THOUGHT

My 2,000 plant specimens have been sorted, labeled, boxed and passed on to a New England university herbarium where they will be cared for properly. Over the last 3 years I have enjoyed sifting through the plants collected as early as 1817, pondering the many environments around the globe they came from and researching the hundreds of botanists represented in the collection. I am grateful to the herbarium for taking them, thank you.

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A GREEN THOUGHT
Height 14 ½ inches by width 9 3/8 inches, 43 pages, manuscript #113
The lettering is completed in watercolor and gouache. The illustrations and book cover are created with watercolor, gouache, pastel, paste, fabric and decorative thread on Arches text wove and Katie MacGregor papers. Joelle Webber of Mermaid Bindery bound the book and box.

The title is taken from stanza 6 of The Garden by Andrew Marvel (1621-1678).
 
‘Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, 

Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas; 
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.’

The text for A GREEN THOUGHT contains poetry/prose by Andrew Marvell, Li Po, and Brian Capon, along with a discussion of the color ‘green’ told by the artist. Topics include: the origin of the word ‘green’, the function of the pigment chlorophyll found in green plants, and the importance of green in our surroundings.

​Green is the love of nature and plants are life.
Completed late summer and posted at Christmas 2017.
 
Nancy Ruth Leavitt
Stillwater, Maine

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