Dearest worms,
We hope you are well and springing forth from the dark soils of winter. Scroll down to check out some new designs from our latest edition of the Fundraiser Shirts Initiative and some news from the plant world.
Respectfully yours,
CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers
QUICK UPDATES & ANNOUNCEMENTS
1.) The newest edition of our Fundraiser Shirts Initiative just dropped. Look like a freakass and support the great work of our friend Woody Minnich!
2.) The kind humans of KCRW visited our greenhouse, the Nonhuman Teachers Botanical Archive, to meet some of our rare and unusual friends.
3.) Earlier this month the botanical world lost one of its great sculptors, the incredible Pearl Fryar. Check out the wonderful documentary on him A Man Named Pearl. RIP!
4.) Our seasonal Spring Cleaning Greenhouse Sale will return to our parking lot on April 24-25 with an impressive haul of new plants for adoption and various duds and doodads looking for their forever home. Mark your calendar!
5.) Spring is springing throughout Los Angeles and thanks to a wet weekend, we are currently enjoying some lovely wild blooms. Call the Thomas Payne Foundation’s Wild Flower Hotline to find out what’s blooming throughout the southland.
FUNDRAISER SHIRT: CACTUS DATA PLANTS
We’ve just released our newest batch of designs from our Fundraiser Shirts Initiative earlier this week. This entry features a collection of reprints of shirts illustrated by our dear friend, the legendary cactus explorer Woody Minnich.
Woody is known internationally for giving presentations on his extensive field work in the diverse terrains of the places he has traveled - from the fog deserts of Namibia and Chile to the wadis of Socotra and arid grasslands of Western Australia. We decided to honor Woody’s commitment to exploration with these international editions of his original designs.
Originally made for his New Mexico nursery, Cactus Data Plants, the illustrations often were used for the annual Inter-City Cactus and Succulent Show & Sale here in Los Angeles.
50% of profits from this shirt go to Woody to support his continued research of the worlds’ desert biomes. Long live Wendell Minnich!
RIP PEARL FRYAR
Sadly, this missive also marks the passing of another titan of the botanical world, the great hedge wizard Pearl Fryar.
For the uninitiated, Fryar was a master topiary artist: the Calder of shrubs, the Miró of bushes, Fryar carried on the millennium’s old tradition of topiary from his humble home in Bishopville, South Carolina with a creative whimsy and playfulness unmatched by his predecessors.
Thankfully, the Pearl Fryar Topiary Garden lives on under the stewardship of fellow topiary artist Michael P. Gibson. With over 400 living sculptures, many of which first came to the garden as orphans found at local nursery compost piles (be still our green hearts), Fryar considered the garden “his gift to the world.”
From the cypress animals in the gardens of Pliny the Elder, to the conical shrubbery of Versailles (Le Nôtre was a bit more of the McCarthy of topiary), to the IP-focused grotesqueries of the Epcot Center, the history of topiary offers a twisted reflection of the history of human civilization. Fryar boldly brought this tradition into the 21st century with characteristic verve and a great generosity of spirit, creating remarkable organic shapes that reflect the quirked up absurdity of our times.
While our little obituary here is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to Fryar’s work, the wonderful 2006 documentary “A Man Named Pearl” is a touching remembrance of this great oak of a man and we highly recommend you check it out.
May he rest in peace!
In the words of Pearl himself: LOVE, PEACE + GOODWILL.
CS Studio & Nonhuman Teachers