Corvi Zeman's Papercut Art

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ᚘ Devil’s Club

Devil’s club is completely armored by fragile yellow thorns that tend to break off under skin when touched. Even the leaves are thorny. Devil’s club is sometimes planted as a park fence, it’s more effective than barbed wire.

I am caution.

I am good judgement, the sort that only comes from having had bad judgement first and picking spines out of your hands.

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ᚗ Wild Ginger

Wild ginger is a creeping ground plant with a spice-scented stalk, glossy green leaves, and strange urn-shaped flowers. Wild Ginger flowers are low to the ground and appear early in the year. Wild Ginger’s pollination technique is to provide shelter from winter winds to small insects, who huddle inside the flowers and move pollen to the next flower as they go.

I am shelter from the cold. Not forever, but a week, a day, seven heartbeats. Long enough to matter.

Whatever small shelter you can give to someone else: it is enough to help.

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ᚖ Trillium

Trilliums have no leaves. They have a three-petaled flower, inside a three- petaled bud, above three more petals that are green and photosynthesize like leaves. They’re cobbled together from the wrong parts, botanically speaking, but they still appear like magic every spring.

I am an impossible task accomplished with the wrong tools. I am duct tape and baling wire and photosynthetic bracts.

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ᚕ Sitka Spruce

Young spruce have the classic dense Christmas tree shape, but they live for hundreds of years and become scarred and strange. When storms break off the top, other branches turn and grow vertically to replace it.

Marbled Murrelets are small seabirds that live out at sea on the open water, but return to the forest to lay eggs. They nest in the corners of scarred spruces with replacement tops. Young perfect trees are no good to them.

I am marked with the story of the storms I have survived.

This thing I have learned: wisdom is a small white bird that alights in the places our scars let light in, and gazes golden-eyed out at the sea.

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ᚔ Pacific Yew

A slow-growing and ageless tree. Probably the same species as the English Yew, which can live for thousands of years.

Estimating the age of a yew is difficult because you cannot count the rings; yews continue growing new branches with green needles and red berries from the hollow shell of the bark even after the center has long rotted away.

I am what does not die.

Even after the center has crumbled, even after you have gone, nothing undoes the good you have done in the lives of others, and from your touch grow branches with soft green needles and red berries.

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ᚓ Quaking Aspen

During the most recent Ice Age, quaking aspens with pale trunks and golden fall color flourished across Western North America. As the ice age ended, the climate got too warm for them to flower or produce seeds in the Southern half of their range.

They remain here only in patches due to clonal propagation: the roots of an aspen tree can grow a second trunk, genetically identical to the first tree, some distance away. The world’s largest organism is a single Quaking Aspen with fifty thousand trunks.

I am defiance of destiny. My time has passed, and still I remain, white and gold upon the hillside. No one need follow what the stars have written.

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ᚒ Rhododendron

Rhododendrons have spectacular flowers to attract honeybees, but their nectar contains grayanotoxins. These neurotoxins don’t affect bees, but the dark red honey made from rhododendron nectar is called “mad honey,” and causes hallucination in humans.

I am the honey you eat in dreams, I am the honey-wine dreamers drink.

I am food for those who dream some strange impossible thing and pull it out into the waking world to mark the universe.

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ᚑ Oregon Oxalis

Oregon Oxalis is well adapted to the shady rainforest floor beneath the leafy canopy. It photosynthesizes when ambient light is one two hundredth the brightness of daylight. When direct sun falls upon it, it just folds up its heart-shaped leaves and waits for shade to return.

I am the small voice in the stillness. 

I am the things you can only learn about yourself in silence.

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ᚐ Douglas Fir

The second-tallest conifer tree; only redwoods are larger. Douglas firs are symbiotic with at least a thousand known underground fungus species: destroying angels, maple lactarius, elf saddles. The fungi form a network around the fir’s roots and help collect enough water to nourish the massive tree. In return, the fir provides sugars made in its leaves. The fungus network also move sugars from old established trees to new seedlings.

I am the daughter of a thousand hidden strangenesses.

It is through the small hidden things - a joke, a smile, a story - that we turn our experiences into our selves.

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ᚏ Blue Elder

Blue elder is a large shrub with pale silvery blue berries. The branches are hollow with a spongy pith. The pith is used to clean watchmaking tools, and the hollow branches are made into musical instruments.

I am emptiness. I am the hollowness that becomes music when the wind blows.

Empty yourself and let the wind fill you with music.

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ᚎ Licorice Fern

Licorice ferns grow without soil on tree trunks. They get their water from rain, their minerals from traces of dirt washed down the tree trunk by rain and caught by their hairy roots, and their carbon and oxygen from carbon dioxide in the air.

I am an eater of air and rain. I create myself from nothing.

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ᚍ Sword Fern

Sword ferns are the most abundant fern in the Pacific Northwest. They are tough and survive droughts and forest fires as underground rhizomes. They are the first plants to regrow after a fire.

I am life after the fire.

I am not a phoenix, returning in a flash of song and spice. It isn’t like that. I am the slow green work of resurrection, one frond at a time, until all the ashen ground is made new. I am the greening of the world.

This is your work too.

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ᚌ Giant Horsetail

The cell walls of mature horsetail plants contain abrasive silicate glass dust. Not much eats a mature plant, but they are sometimes used to sand wood and polish metal.

I am glass. Touch me not. To destroy something is to be destroyed by it.

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ᚋ Dwarf Mistletoe

Dwarf mistletoe is an odd parasitic plant that grows on hemlock trees and steals their moisture and energy. Dwarf mistletoe produces the plant hormone cytokinin, which changes the growth pattern of the host tree. Cytokinin causes the tree to grow a witch’s broom: a clump of dozens of dense spindly branches, a perfect shelter for mistletoe and moths.

Dwarf mistletoe spreads via pods that heat up and explode to fire seeds onto nearby trees, to create another witch’s broom.

I carry home curled fiercely within me, and anyplace I land becomes my home. I am a stranger nowhere.

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ᚊ Salmonberry

Salmonberry bushes grow in damp soil along salmon-run streams. The salmon are born in streams, but they spend most of their lives in the sea, and upon their return they are made of sea-stuff. The nitrogen of their bodies is the isotopes found in the sea. When bears eat salmon and leave bones to decay on the stream bank, the sea-nitrogen becomes part of the soil, and of the salmonberries.

I am made of an ocean I have never seen. I am homesickness for a place you have never been.

I am this promise: the sea exists, even if you have not seen it. It sings against the shore and waits for you.

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ᚉ Western Hemlock

On the shaded floor of the rainforest, there is not enough sunlight or water for new trees to sprout. But when one of the old giants falls, it breaks off branches from the canopy and leaves a long line of sunlight across the forest floor. Hemlocks grow atop the trunk of the fallen tree. As it decays it leaves long straight lines of hemlocks on stilt roots and the eerie sense that the forest is organizing itself.

I am the word that writes itself upon the world. I grow stranger and truer with every windy winter.

Listen: you are also a word writing yourself upon the world, and nobody else knows the meaning of you.

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ᚈ Orange Honeysuckle

Orange Honeysuckle displays hummingbird pollination syndrome, a set of traits shared by plants pollinated by hummingbirds: red or orange colors, trumpet-shaped flowers, no scent, heavy nectar production. Unrelated plants all develop these characteristics to appeal to hummingbirds. So orange honeysuckle has more in common with other hummingbird pollination syndrome plants than it does to the species it is genetically related to.

I am the family you meet along the way. I am the family you choose.