Field of Science

Holiday Gift Idea for Botanists & Gardeners - Wear Your Produce

Uh oh, the Phactor has been caught only thinking about himself again, so best to correct that situation right away with a really amazing gift idea for HER. Why not wear your garden produce year around helping to solve that perennial problem of what to do with too many zucchini? Artist Margaret Dorfman makes some amazing jewelry out of zucchini, star fruit, beets (r-l), and watermelon radish, as well as decorator bowls out of potatoes. They hardly sound elegant and you cannot imagine how such mundane items become attractive decor, but thin slices are turned into parchment, and this is not so weird when you remember that cell walls are cellulose, the stuff of paper. At some location now lost in memory a book was on display whose pages were parchment made from slices of watermelon. One can imagine the juicy story those pages could bear, and it was so strange to not grasp what you were looking at until someone told you, and then it was quite clear, but ever so nifty. And yes, people will ask about these striking objects.