San Diego Botanical Garden brings Zentangle together with Dreamcatchers

Today at the San Diego Botanical Garden in Encinitas California, I brought Native American Indians and Zentangle Method together.

If you haven't been to this wonderful Botanical Garden, you should drop by.   

Side Story - Right now, the garden has a cactus that is blooming:

The plant, Amorphophallus titanium, which is best known by its nickname ‘Corpse Flower,’ is known for the stench it emits (some say it smells like a dead animal or rotten flesh) and its spectacularly fast blooming peak.

It is the first time the garden has had a corpse flower on display since 2006. The Botanic Garden has the plant on loan from Cal State Fullerton, and Garden President and CEO Julian Duval said large crowds converged on the garden last weekend looking forward to seeing if the plant lives up to its name.

“It’s clearly one of the real phenomena of the plant kingdom,” Duval said last week. “It has these strange, unpredictable blooming intervals and it looks otherworldly.”

In bloom, the large green spike-like pod, called a spadix, turns yellow, and the large leaves tightly wrapped around it become beautiful magenta-colored flaps. The plant begins to pulse the putrid stench, which Duval said is a pheromone that attracts dung beetles to pollinate it in the plant’s native Sumatran rain forest habitat.

The plant only blooms for a short time — the trademark scent lasting two days at most — and the entire bloom cycle lasts less than a month.  Even before it reached its bloom, crowds were flocking to the plant to catch a glimpse at the four-foot pod.

“It’s quite a paradox when it blooms because it’s so beautiful, yet gives off such a foul smell,” Moore said. “I want to come back just to smell it.”

Back to the Zentangle class:  today I shared some information about the Native American Dreamcatcher.

                                 The Dreamcatcher

Native Indians believe that night is full of both good and bad dreams.   When a dreamcatcher is hung above where you sleep, it catches the dreams that drift by.  The good dreams go thru center of web and slide down the feathers to those sleeping below.   The bad dreams are caught in the webbing and destroyed (burned) at the first light of morning sun.

Traditional dreamcatchers are only 3-5 inches across.  The must be made from natural materials.  Every part of a dream catcher had a meaning.  The dreamcatcher represents the mind, body, spirit aspects of our personality, moods and emotions. The ring and the web represent love, honesty and purity.   All of the combined elements on the dreamcatcher represent aspects of earth, fire, water -- all things we need to live.

Once the dreamcatcher is hung freely, it represents the element of air.  The hoop represents the earth – “the circle of life” made from a willow.  The dreamcatcher is patterned after a spider’s web to catch bad dreams and keep them from entering the dreamer’s head.

 
Anita and her daughter, Karen,  joined me today at the garden to learn what in the heck Zentangle is. Even though they didn't get to create a "basic" tile, we had a great time creating a Zentangle Dreamcatcher and listening to Native American Indian music.

 

Thank for a fun day ladies.