Marcescence

This wintery landscape series focuses on holding on.

When thinking of Canadian seasons, we usually think of autumn as the time of year when plant-life begins to die and deciduous trees slowly lose their leaves heading in to the cold winter months. Months that often feel like a desolate gap between nature that once thrived and the new life of springtime. If you look closer however, not everything is gone. Some trees retain a few of their withering leaves all the way through to the spring - a phenomenon known as marcescence.

Marcescence - the retention of dead plant organs that are usually shed.

Learning of this phenomenon, I became fascinated by this and other, ordinarily overlooked, signs of nature's resilience. Inspired that these parts of nature, withering and half-way to death, are able to hold on to life a little longer, I began looking at the different parts of nature that still held on to some warmth and life, despite being surrounded by the cold emptiness of a winter season.