About Patterns of Color

We got a new puzzle underway.  I had been considering a number of puzzle possibilities.  If you’re going to stare at something for hours on end, it may as well be unfathomably alluring and sufficiently complicated and textured to allow for a celebration of color.  Frank Lloyd Wright’s Saguaro Stained Glass seems to speak to John La Farge, and the lounge of the Imperial Hotel across from Hibya Park in Tokyo which he originally designed while at the same time suggesting something anchored in Native American sensibilities.  Created originally as a Liberty Magazine cover from 1926-27, it was never used.  Too “radical,” the many repetitive online entries repeating this adjective, in quotes, was apparently how it was seen.  Later the design found its way into a 1973 redesign of the Arizona Biltmore which Wright had advised in the construction of in 1928. 

I had spied this puzzle among the popular choices that Amazon through up for my consideration.  As regular readers know, I’ve recently screwed up more than once ordering puzzles that weren’t puzzles or puzzles that were micro-puzzles for the nearsighted.  Mystically connected, of course, my mom wonderfully presented me with precisely the puzzle I’d been considering getting myself.  The periphery came together quickly and whereas the Hironimus Bosch we’d recently done was all about creatures and objects this was strictly about patterns of color. 

I rode south today.  And today I had a mission.  I was going to add ten new species.  I’d positively identified nineteen yesterday so another ten seemed modest.  Biking along I grabbed the breaks here and there and crouched down to zero-in on one or another plant which invariably, was one I’d already photographed or was to remain unidentifiable.  And for a second I had the sinking feeling that I’d already identified everything there was to note. 

More accurately I was running up against the limits of this app.  It’s mid-April and the leaves aren’t on the trees, so that broad assemblage isn’t relevant.  Half the clumps you stoop down over just report back that they are of the Asters, in general or some form of grass.  But as with yesterday’s experience when you do actually find something new, it’s all rather satisfying and curative of frustration.  Today’s new species include: Great Mullein, Bitter Wintercress, Virginia Strawberry, Sheep’s Sorrel, Common Blue Wood Aster, Hound’s-tongue, Common Mugwort, Chinese Arborvitae, Poronidulus conchifer, and Common Greenshield Lichen. 

Wednesday 4/22/20