I visited Niagara Falls three nights ago while in St Catherine’s for a fabulous opening at Rodman Hall. To my surprise these stage lights were trained on the Falls at night, from the Canadian side, so tourists won’t miss a viewing oportunity. The spectacle of nature never sleeps and meanwhile alien abductions happen left right and centre. Note to self: perfect location for a zombie film.

There is a new corpse flower mega-star about to bloom Monday night at Lehman College’s garden in The Bronx - the corpse flower was once the official flower of The Bronx! This is an extremely rare occurance and particularly if you missed the Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s corpse flower bloom last year! I made an animation about Brooklyn’s corpse flower - it’s on view right now at Long Island University Gallery, in a show curated by Aron Namenwirth (see previous post).

Writes Ken Gregory, “Sun Suckers feed by sitting in the sun light and sucking up rays of light with their skin out stretched…They don’t bite…Sun Suckers are notorious singers…Sun Suckers communicate with other Sun Suckers using a sort of complex telepathy that uses high frequency sound waves which humans can not hear.” Sun suckers are non-native, non-invasive, machines introduced to the banks of the Red River by Winnipeg artist Ken Gregory. Read more at his website cheapmeat.net.

It’s true that I have not yet killed, just inadvertently tortured and maimed, the one piece of nature I have been in contact with this summer - namely, a tobacco plant given to me by artist Zoë Sheehan Saldaña as part of her recent “Homegrown” installation at ArtMoving Projects.

I am trying to nurse it back to health for the love of plants and my friendship with the artist, but despite giving it a home in my new studio which is essentially a greenhouse, the tobacco is not thriving. Maybe this early demise has to do with my poor relationship to smoking offending its very being - I do make the occasional rude comment to visitors about the “odour”. Perhaps it’s my special brand of aloofness that passes for “nursing back to health”.

I just visited Zoë’s website and was met with an onslaught of glowing nurturing green faces - feeling extra guilty now.