Urban Flowers - and other lessons learned

I built an arbor for a commercial plant operation this last summer. It took me longer than I expected because I had to build it twice. It isn’t the first time I have had to do something twice – or more – when it met neither client’s aspirations nor mine. In almost every case the metal generally can and is repurposed into something else. And generally it is a progressive lesson or learning experience. Like care-giving, you have to live it to know there will be progressive learning and lessons twice or more learned. Perhaps as General Patton (as played by George C. Scott) allegedly said “I don’t like to pay for the same real estate twice”, lessons sometimes are expensive.

In this case I am repurposing a couple thousand bucks worth of steel tubing. For the project I chose steel tubing rather than pipe for strength and weight considerations. I envisioned tree boughs linking through the rings and the tree becoming guided sculpture and the sculpture/arbor becoming one with the trees. The client saw the rings and looked at me in horror. Apparently I didn’t think about the rings cutting off and chocking the tree limbs. But once again, like care-giving, I’d set aside patience, jumping right in before considering the consequences. An arbor requires patience. Wishing a tree forward will not make it grow any faster. I went out and visited the installation last week and saw that the tree wasn’t cooperating and growing at a rate that would engage the arbor anytime soon. The two remain separated like uneasy relatives or in-laws on holidays. It will take a long time for the trees to become one with the arbor and so patience, nurturing, and limb training will be the point of the study for the next several years.

I get to reset my expectations…sound familiar?

Meanwhile the original arbor, now reduced to pieces by metal cutting wheels, starts a new life as a “skeletal” frame for a full-scale (very large) creature on which I will report appropriate progress. And the limbs and rings, they quite by accident became an “urban flower”.