2016

I've kept this blog, on and off, since 2006. In 2015 I used it to chart daily encounters, images, thoughts and feelings about volcanic basalt/bluestone in Melbourne and Victoria, especially in the first part of the year. I plan to write a book provisionally titled Bluestone: An Emotional History, about human uses of and feelings for bluestone. But I am also working on quite a few other projects and a big grant application, especially now I am on research leave. I'm working mostly from home, then, for six months, and will need online sociability for company!


Tuesday, March 24, 2015

My Year with Bluestone: Gleditsia Triacanthos

Perhaps there will be a chapter in my bluestone book that might be a little photo-essay about all the things that fall on or sit on top of bluestone: mostly plants, leaves, flowers, blossoms, but also sand, gravel, rubbish and sometimes rain and hail.

I took this photo today, walking home a different way. (I also fantasise about whether it would be possible to walk to work just walking on bluestone laneways.)

They are seed pods of gleditsia triacanthos. In autumn, lines of these trees light up the streets around here with luminous yellow leaves. It's a North American tree, introduced into Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century. The trees produce these long pods in the first few years of their lives. They are supposed to fall into water, but here they have fallen into a bluestone laneway, garnishes with yellow fragments. The asymmetry of nature and this lavish effusion of seed pods like giant caterpillars onto the beloved geometry of stones

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