STORY BEHIND THE ART OF SUSAN TOMLINSON

Botanical Art Worldwide: America's Flora

Buffalo Gourd

Curcurbita foetidissima

Buffalo gourd is a common native plant on the Llano Estacado, where I live. Unfortunately, there isn’t much native landscape left here—what is not covered by urban areas is used for agriculture, mainly cotton. So it is not a surprise that, as striking as buffalo gourd is, many people who have lived here all their lives do not recognize this plant when they see it.

Just inside the city limits there is a small archeological park, Lubbock Lake Landmark, which is being restored to a native prairie landscape. The land there has been, among other things, a place to dump old mattresses and automobiles. But the discovery of archeological artifacts changed all of that. It turns out that this unassuming, ugly pocket of land contains archeological evidence of 12,000 years of human habitation, and as such, people decided it needed to be preserved. Over the past couple of decades, the staff has worked hard to coax the prairie back to life here. And so, if you take a walk along the wildflower trail they have created, you can now find buffalo gourd everywhere underfoot—and yet people have no idea what it is. When I take my students out to the Lubbock Lake Landmark for classes, it is the plant I am most frequently asked about. When I post paintings of it on Facebook, my friends and neighbors ask me about “that thing you’ve painted that looks like a watermelon.” Mind you, buffalo gourd is not a tiny plant—where it grows, it sprawls everywhere, with large leaves, and vines as thick as bones. The flower is big and bright yellow, with fruit the size of a baseball. And yet, it is less known to people than the English roses that grow in our gardens. This troubles me, because if we do not know what we have in a place, then how will we know when we lose it? Thus it was that the lowly buffalo gourd was the first plant I thought of when I considered painting something for this exhibition.

The thing is, however, buffalo gourd stinks. Its Latin name, Curcurbita foetidissima hints at this. The leaves are particularly pungent, with an odor something like a day-old cheeseburger. That same powerful odor attracts large, biting black flies. I know this because that odor and those flies were with me through the hours of field sketching I did for this painting. And because buffalo gourd blooms mid-summer, I was also doing the fieldwork in the hot sun in my shorts and tee shirt, and the biting flies loved all of that sweaty, exposed flesh. So when I look at my painting, the smell, the heat, the sweat, the biting flies—and all of the associated cursing—come back to me. And in a strange way, the suffering I endured to get this painting makes me love the plant even more. Perhaps this is because it is like this landscape itself—the people who love it are the ones who are determined to love it.

Osage Orange

Maclura pomifera

If buffalo gourd, the plant in my other painting, is relatively unknown to my friends and neighbors, the same could not be said of the Osage orange. When I posted an image of this painting on Facebook, it seemed everyone had a story to tell about it from childhood. The fruit of the Osage orange, apparently, makes a particularly effective weapon for children bent on mischief: large, sticky, hard as a rock, and capable of breaking windows or leaving a mess on sidewalks and driveways when squished. They are also fun to roll down hills.

Those same friends also had multiple folk names for it: horse apple, bois d’arc, bodark, hedge-apple, bow-wood, yellowwood, and mock orange. There are probably more. Its Latin name is Maclura pomifera, but almost nobody knows it by this. It is perhaps a measure of affection to have so many different common names. To name something is to give it a place in your understanding of the world.

Osage orange (or, as I know it, the bodark tree) is originally native to Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, though it has been naturalized throughout the United States. I don’t have childhood memories of the bodark tree, perhaps because I grew up in the deserts of New Mexico. My first recollection of this tree was from a trip to Rockport, Texas, a small town on the Gulf Coast. I saw my first opossum and caught a sheepshead fish on that trip, too, and as a consequence, the coastal region of Texas was forever imprinted in this desert girl’s mind as a mysterious landscape, filled with weird, unsettling life forms.

So when early one fall the fruit of the tree appeared at my feet on my walks to and from my house to the university where I work, I was surprised. I knew exactly what it was, of course, since it looks so unusual—like chartreuse brain matter—but here? So far from the coast?

I looked it up when I got home, where I learned that far from being confined to the coast, it is very widespread. It is also known as much for its wood as for its odd-looking fruit. Legend has it that Native Americans used it to make their bows (hence bois-d’arc, or “bow wood”). Other legends about the wood abound, including one I heard one day at a neighborhood Christmas party (which also says something about people’s affection for the tree, given that we were sitting around talking about it at a party) about ranchers using the wood for fencing, only to have new trees sprout from the planted posts.

I like painting complicated things, and the surface of the fruit, with its jigsaw-puzzle nooks and crannies very much appealed to me. So the next day I picked up one of those odd fruits littering the ground and took it home with me, and that grew into the painting you see here. Which, if you think about it, is not unlike a fence post growing into a tree.

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