Ologies with Alie Ward - Salixology (WILLOWS & SCULPTURE) with Patrick Dougherty

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

It’s the Ologies 9th Anniversary episode – and the customary gift is willow. So I reached out to an artist whose work means a lot to me, and convinced world-renowned environmental sculptor Patrick Dougherty to chat about his work, and about willows in general. Twisting and tangling literal tons of willow saplings, Patrick and his crews create huge, site-specific sculptures that look like fantastical buildings, but made almost entirely of sustainably-sourced branches. I’ve loved his work for decades, and this chat was like a kid meeting their basketball hero. We also address: cleaning up ecology with willows, their spine-like roots, why some willows weep, plumbing follies, medicinal uses of willows, why they’re so bendy, the poetry that nature inspires, why sniffing sticks is healthy, the physics of birds’ nests, and reconnecting with the wonder you had as a child. Instant classic. Visit Patrick’s website and follow him on InstagramBuy James Florio’s photography book Sticks featuring 16 of Patrick’s projectsA donation went to the NC Conservation NetworkMore episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Dendrology (TREES), Canistrumology (BASKET WEAVING), Ethnoecology (ETHNOBOTANY/NATIVE PLANTS), Indigenous Fashionology (NATIVE CLOTHING), Modern Toichographology (MURALS & STREET ART), FIELD TRIP: I Take You to the Making of a Mural, Salugenology (WHY HUMANS REQUIRE HOBBIES), Castorology (BEAVERS), Field Trip: How to Change Your Life via the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles400+ Ologies episodes sorted by topicSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, hey, it's your new phone case you're not quite used to. Allie Ward. And this is a big one for us. It's a big one for me. It's our 531st episode, but more importantly, this week marks the ninth anniversary since Ology's first episode came out. So we like to look up those anniversary guides. And I was thrilled to discover that the customary ninth anniversary gift is Willow. I was like, what? I love Willow. I grew up around it. We had a creek in my backyard. right outside the gate in a pasture. One of my favorite artists makes these willow sculptures. If you listen to the field trip episode at the Natural History Museum of LA County, I did years back. I talk about this willow structure built in the gardens that so buoyed my spirits during a really dark time that I named my production company after it, Willow Hut. That structure was built by an L.A. artist by the name of David Lovejoy, who had assisted this one internationally acclaimed Willow sculpture pioneer, or whose work I've been obsessed with for the past like 15 years.

Huge, tangled, but somehow orderly, these sweeping castles made out of sticks. They look like tumbling forms that seem to spill out of buildings. Just a feeling of like, wait, how is this giant thing I'm looking at made entirely of sticks? It's like a fever dream. Like an accidental mushroom snack that made the winds conspire to build you a haven. Anyway, that artist that I've been obsessed with is this week's guest. So this is not a topic you ever anticipated. I'm sure you might be like, huh?

It's one that is so close to my heart. I don't even care if you care about it, but you will deeply in less than an hour. So I emailed this guest out of nowhere and I said I'm a huge fan. I would be willing to cross the country for a chance to sit down and ask about your work. And a few weeks later, I find myself on these shady roads. under the canopies of North Carolina, outside of Chapel Hill, about to turn onto this long gravel road that leads to a stone house they share with their wife, Linda. So I'm looking for a willow.

I'm looking for some sort of stick gate, according to Google Maps. I think I'm getting close. No, okay. It is very woodsy here. Oh, here we go. Of course. The gates are made out of sticks. And then I saw him full head of white hair, wearing a tiny denim shirt and some smart jeans, just ambling casually out of the gate.

And we'll hear more about their work, what a willow is and the history and the folklore behind these weedy trees. But first, a huge thank you to patrons of the show who support at patreon.com slash ologies and submit questions ahead of time. Thank you to everyone who is out there in ologiesmerch from ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to all the folks who leave reviews for the show, which has literally kept us in your ears the last nine years. I read all of them. So thank you, Janet Dalywell, who left a review today saying that Ologies was named in their master's thesis for keeping them focused during very rough lab work. So I'm very honored to be cozy in the pages of your thesis. Congrats on the master's.

Also timely, given me naming my company after this guest's work. So the only bigger honor is if someone found like a parasite and called it oligysium or something, but one can dream. Also, thank you to sponsors of ologies who make it possible to donate to a cause of this guest choosing. Okay, let's get into it. So Salix is Latin for willow tree, just straight up. And there are somewhere between 330 and 500 plus species of willow in the world. Likewise, fun number coincidence. This ologist has completed 330 sculptures out of willow as well as other woods.

So we're going to chat about species, bendiness, site-specific art installations, folklore, plumbing, weeping over willows, aspirin, gloves, caskets, willow remediation to the rescue, and why spending hours a day outside can change your life with environmental sculptor, willow handler, artistic legend, hero of mind, an honorary salaxologist Patrick Doherty. He, him. I'm Patrick Doherty. I'm a sapling sculptor. And, you know, I have loved your work for so many years. It's so stunning. For anyone who hasn't seen it, it almost looks like these wind-swept stick sculptures that are huge, very much larger than life. They have a certain kinetic sense to them. They have a lot of movement, and it seems impossible that a person can make them. We try to make something that looks really natural. It doesn't look man-made.

Yeah. And one of the things, by using a kind of a drawing style, can get a sense of animation in the surface. For example, if you hit a piece of paper with one weight, on a pencil with one weight, and you finish off with another, you have tapered lines. Since sticks are tapered, if you organize them in one direction, it implies a kind of sense of animation or movement. And so it's a way of building an illusion like you would with the drawing.

And does that mean that a lot of the weight, the thicker end of the stick tends to be at the bottom and then it wisps up? It can be. Basically, the style of making is to start, well, of course, with a plan and what you're trying to do and leave enough room within the plan so that you can add lib as you go. But structural work is always first. and in a lot of cases that means digging holes in the ground and sticking bigger sticks, basically small trees in there, setting a scaffolding around that,

and then bending these uprights into the shape that you're proposing. And then once you finish your kind of structural phase, you start on the aesthetics of it. Oh, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the finally is the cosmetics where, like in a drawing, you would erase. Yeah. So you can go back and put little sticks over things you don't like to give it a, more of a sense of motion. So, you know, my job is to build an illusion, one that causes people to

come running. And so, you know, part of that is the serendipitous nature of not planning so strongly or fully, but discovery as you move along. I'm wondering a little bit about the materials you use, because I know that it varies based on what location you're at. Right. I've read that red maples, your favorite. Yeah. But then out in the west, you, there's a of willow. We've used a lot of willow. Can you kind of run me through some of the saplings that you work with? And where do you get them? Well, if the organization we're working for has enough money and they don't have the energy to find material, we might order material. And we've ordered it from Fredonia, New York. There's a double A willows. And then we've ordered from Canada,

Montreal. We had a source and outside of San Francisco. But generally, we'll find a way together. say in France, we might have found a sewage treatment plant that has planted willow out in and around it so that they dump the excess water in there and take off the water. You know, everywhere that you can possibly think of around lakes along rivers, we'll just find a good place to discover where we can get some material. I have to ask permission, but. Yeah. And a lot of times the Forestry Service and lots of other people have helped us find material.

And we'll use maples and sweet gums and just a myriad of other plants that are flexible. They need to be flexible and they need to have a certain beauty to them. And a lot of times the material that you would think of, oh, well, we have plenty of autumn olive or we have plenty of – those are materials that are not that usable, even though they might be a pest. Oh, yeah? You know. Are they less flexible? Sometimes it's flexibility and sometimes they have little thorns.

on them or some other thing. They're just not a beautiful stick, you know. So oftentimes the one that people would prefer that we use and say, oh, we have a ton of that. We say, well, you know, that's not the best one, not for, you know, actually weaving. Yeah. So, and then in California, you've got a lot of willow in Montana. You've got willow.

You've got other things, fire cherry, some other things that are mountain plants that you can use. Out in Hawaii, you might use strawberry gullow. Java or Java plum. Oftentimes, they are trees that grow fast like maples that people would prefer not to have that many. And so, yes, there are hundreds of species of willows, and they tend to love water. They thrive at the banks of rivers and streams and wetlands. And the most common species you might see is Salix Alba, which is the white willow, which grows fast, and grows big, sometimes eight stories tall. But then again, there are many a willow.

And while most are native to the northern hemisphere, there are a few in the southern hemisphere, but this one 1987 paper in the Journal of Systematics and Distribution, titled On the Distribution and Origin of Salix in the world, says in a very sweetly down home kind of tone, it says, such to and fro willow migration between Asia and Europe and between North America occurred so often that it resulted in the diversity of willow species in Asia. So a lot of to and fro willow migration. Some of it good, some of it bad. There was a 2009 paper in ecological engineering titled The Characterization of Willow Varieties for Use in Ecological Engineering Applications, Coordination of Structure, Function, and Autocology. And it stumped me with autocology. I'd never seen that. But apparently, autocology is the study of the adaptedness of individual organisms. So think ecology and A-U-T, like auto, something on its own, autocology. But there's

the white willow, there's the weeping willow, there's a shining willow, a black willow, coyote willow. Of course, there's pussy willow. Also called the goat willow, which can live up to 300 years. And there's this 2017 Brooklyn Botanical Garden article titled aptly, what are pussy willows? Anyway, I like that it has a little bit of an attitude. And it explains that those little bunny tail-shaped soft velvety growths on the branches of pussy willows are actually flowers just before they fully bloom. So that soft coating of hairs acts as insulation to protect these early flowers from the cold. So that is a little background on willow. But again, there are so many species. And that's not the only type of wood that Patrick thoughtfully sources

to sculpt into these stunning nest-like forms. So like in the southern pine forest, they're often going in and cutting out underneath the forest and taking all of these trees down for less competition. Duke University, Duke Forest have been very kind to us. In their forestry operations, they're often clearing under pine trees that they want to, you know, have the best chance of making a hundred-year-old board, you know.

And same thing, some place like Clemson and South Carolina. They have huge forestry projects, so we were able to gather in their forest. I understand, too, that when there's development and they're kind of clearing out land to build something, and then they'll go do something for a few weeks, and the meanwhile saplings start to come back up. So initially, when I started sculpture and started building on site, I would take materials from farmland or excess places in North Carolina and drive it up and down the eastern seaboard and made work in Florida, work in Maine, work everywhere. Then I discovered that there, in fact, were saplings ready to go in all states and even, you know, in all foreign countries too, because urbanization means that, you know, the belt lines of every city provides plenty of materials.

So a beltline is just what it sounds like. It's the border around an urban expansion where developments are moving out from the city center, kind of turning into more housing and commerce. Less nature, but life finds a way. And Patrick finds saplings because... Forest are cut down and then, you know, like weed trees come up and there are kind of ladies in waiting because eventually the bulldozers arrive and they're making housing projects and all kinds of... business opportunities. So if you catch this melee, it is exactly the right time. We've been accused of stopping along the interstate screaming at someone, no, don't cut it, we'll come there. And then that might be a hundred miles to get back to the landowner, you know, because we see the perfect thing. Yeah. The other thing is people are often giving you permission and they don't own the land. So if you don't hit the right person, or it might be a family and the daughter got permission. mission for you and the son said, my daddy never told you you could gather that. So, you know,

you can get into family warfare if you're not careful. I feel like a part of your job has to be being good at interfacing with other people because you are gathering. And then also when you're making these site-specific sculptures, you've got a lot of looky-lose and probably a lot of people saying, like, what are you doing? That's right. Probably the best part of my job was the fact that I built all my work on site, and I was willing, we had no barriers to keep people from walking up because it's relatively innocuous work. We're not slinging big timbers around. I'm sure you've made a lot of fans along the way just as they're watching how these things are coming together over a period of almost three weeks, right?

That's right. A three-week work period is a pretty good period because if you work longer than that, your sights are getting very tired. Yeah. Because we, you know, have a, cooperative thing, the people that we're working for our sponsors are also, we're using their goodwill and their leverage in the community to get things set up for us, a site, maybe finding materials, getting some scaffolding over there, and so forth. So, and once they get something there that people become very interested in, it becomes a much more public work. Right. And Patrick, alongside countless volunteers, and in the last decade, his full-time construction assistant Sam, who is also a talented ceramicist and his son, has completed over 300 of these huge sculptures

in a ton of states and countries from Scotland to Japan with another upcoming Japan construction for the International Horticultural Expo outside of Tokyo next March. So this man was born, booked and busy. And I understand that even as a youth, you were an outside kid, right? you were out kind of playing with sticks and playing in the forest. Can you tell me a little bit about maybe how nostalgia played into where your path as an artist kind of took you? Well, I think kids know everything about sticks. It's a weapon, a tool, a piece of a wall. They're used in so much of kid play, basically because it's an available, you see a child

will pick up a stick and drag it down the street. And it's my contention now that we kind of replay some of our hunting and gathering past that deep within us in our subconscious, we have an innate knowledge of how to work with this material because it's been so sentinel to dwellings, basketry, all kinds of other ways that we've employed sticks when we really didn't have steel and glass and other things. And so kids kind of replay that initiative. And so like I must have capitalized that a little bit in my childhood and then somehow seen saplings as, kind of an initial place to start making artwork. That's why birds and gorillas and all these other animals and so forth insects, and they are just taking the same sticks at a more micro-level

and figuring out what to do with them. Oftentimes you think of craftsmanship, but when you see a Bowerbird work, you realize that craftsmanship is really, in some ways, just a repetitive act. If you repeat something in pretty much the same way each time again and again, it starts looking like it has meaning and importance and innate ability as being played out somehow because this thing looks so even and so beautiful. I would say that birds nests in some ways are a wealth of knowledge about how to hold things together. Yeah. One of the things I try to do is to not use any. fasteners and so forth because I want it to look more thorough.

And part of the naturalness of the thing is that somehow it just seems to be there. And that's the way you feel about bird nest too. And a minimum of movement, you know, like moving it back and forth, locking it in. Which reminds me that Nidology is the study of birds nests. And yes, there is a museum dedicated to this ology. It's only like an hour and a half away for me. I don't know why I haven't been. Stay tuned. I got to take a journey there. But if you're feeling inspired to bend twigs,

who among us is not. Let's get to some physics of the tension of tangled things. So there was a 2023 paper in the journal Science titled Ultra Fast Reversible Self-Assembly of Living Tangled Matter. And it blasts out of the gate in the intro with something so relatable, it sounds like a Tuesday night open mic, saying anyone has ever packed away a rope without coiling it properly, knows how it. easily it gets tangled, and how difficult it can be to untangle. And it says by contrast, California black worms will migrate into a tangled ball over the course of minutes to regulate temperature or moisture, but then disentangle and scatter within milliseconds upon sensing danger. I'm sorry, a worm ball? Yes, tangled active filaments are ubiquitous in nature. It says,

from chromosomal DNA to root networks. And, yeah, worm collect. And this paper found that alternating helical waves like spiral waves makes it easy to tangle and then rapidly untangle if you're in a worm ball and are a worm and you need to get out of dodge. So this is a form of topology, which is another ology we have not covered. And that is the math of spaces, especially weird spaces. And there was a 2025 Harvard article titled, How Do Birds Nest Stay Together? Researchers unravel entanglement between stiff, straight rods, and it celebrates the paper entanglement transition in random rod packings. This all explains that researchers collabed with the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, which lent them a real bird's nest that had been made with steel wires

by a bird, and either really desperate or just an insufferable steampunk bird. But as the paper asked, Are we humans smart enough to decipher how they do so? Time will tell. So the humans standing over this bird's nest first deployed x-ray computerized tomography. So they put it in the CT scanner to unveil the structure, right, and the geometrical and topological complexity of this bird's nest that a bird made with these steel wires. So what were their findings? So they said that increasing the aspect ratio of rods leads to a proliferation of regions of strong entanglement. What does that mean? It means the skinnier, longer sticks tangle more easily than the short fat ones. I mean, yeah. Yeah, at least one of you is listening to this while, I don't know, chewing on a tree and

building a dam. Or maybe you're trying to untangle a thin, just hopelessly knotted necklace, being like, no shit, Sherlock, I'm in it right now. But this is how Patrick can make 50-foot sculptures out of long, skinny sticks. Topology, baby. Like you get a matrix and then you start pulling sticks through that matrix in specific ways. And you're constantly, as you're working, you're saying to yourself better or worse, how could I use these lines to improve the reaction that the public has made? It looks more natural. It looks like it moves more freely. It apes the idea that you could go in and hide somewhere.

You don't want to trap your viewer, but you want them to feel comfortable and surround it in a kind of sense of maybe what a bird feels when it's nestled down. And so I think there's a little bit of Garden of Eden desire in everybody to go across a forest curtain and kind of live and breathe with the other animals. Yeah. And so, you know, when you make things out of sticks and they call to you, it's in a way it called to some of your deeper subconscious feelings. And often, you know, people will tell you about trees they've known when they were small, simple, hard and easy, big Mr. Twister, because you're a kind of a sitting duck while

you're working. If people have emotive moments, oftentimes you're the recipient, you know, they'll say, I had my first kiss under the lilac bush. I, you know, I, I deforced my husband or wife, and then I took a walk in the woods. And I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. You know, I saw the light coming through, a shaft of light hitting a bath. You know, there's a lot of poetics that are connected with our impressions of where we've been when sticks and nature surrounded us, you know. Ever heard of haiku?

Yeah, there's a lot of poetry out there. It's just a song to the trees. There's this one haiku I recently read that was by an early 1700s poet, Chiojo, or Lady Chio, a famous and well-respected poet in a time when female poets were not respected. And she married a servant. She had a son. The son died as a baby. And then her husband died less than two years later. She never remarried. She lived another 50 years. And there was this one poem translated by Daniel Buchanan. And it reads, bearing no flowers, I am free to toss madly like the willow tree. So if you were child free like me, your dad, just think of it as an excuse to toss madly. So what?

Yeah, like your job as an on-site artist and as an artist in general, you're like a bartender where you are a craftsman at a certain things. which is these things you make, and then you're having this real-time reaction. And sometimes those things get played back into the work. I mean, I always feel like the work is a collection of stories in a way. You've embedded something of premonition almost out of your subconscious, and then somehow there's uptake with it, and it's furthered, because people tell you stories about their own particularity, you know.

Yeah. And the nests they have outside. their window or the beavers dam they saw or something they saw when they visited an indigenous tribe somewhere. Because a lot of the world still has nothing to work with. So they're picking up saplings and things that grow back. So if you went into the woods and cut a lot of little trees down, little saplings, you know, the next year they would be sprouted right back. Just a side note, beavers get it. They get it. They chopped down on some willow. They move into the dam.

The willow sticks are like, hell yeah. And then the ecosystem is clotted up more to make their little ponds. And fish thrive, hiding in the roots, so do the bugs. And it all works out. And just a heads up, we do have a castorology episode about beavers. We have an indigenous fashionology and a conestromology episode on basket weaving methods and plant material. Also, of course, a two-part dentrology episode about trees. We'll link all of those in the show notes.

And if you're like, what's wicker? Is it willow? Yeah, it can be. Wicker comes from the root for Willow. But it's come to mean anything like woven basket like with plant or even synthetic cordage or flexible rods. Rattan now is made of woven palm specifically. So newsflash, we use plants for a lot of things. Willow has even been cultivated as a more renewable resource for energy needs as it can be burned for electricity and then it also captures carbon as it regrows. And according to this 2005 paper, genetic improvement of shrub willow crops for bioenergy and environmental applications in the United States, when 10 to 15% of coal is replaced with willow biomass for burning, sulfur and nitrogen emissions. are reduced. And since the carbon that's emitted through burning the willow biomass for energy was initially captured from the atmosphere during the growth of the willow, there's no increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide when power is produced from willow biomass. So cultivating all this willow for different industries was actually news to me. I was I did not know that. So that's the way that willow farms work, you know, is that they're using the same rootstock

all the time and they're cutting it off. They sell it or use it for power plants or cut it and make riparian things for streams and so forth. But it's a constant product that could come from cutting and letting it grow back and cutting it again. Maybe that's one reason why saplings are such a comfort to look at. It almost implies water and nutrients. You know that if a sapling is sprouting, that you're probably safe as well. Yeah, well, that's true. And there's a freshness when you see the first shoot coming out of the ground. And so a lot of that gets played out in these sculptures. When you're inside to be able to see out through windows and maybe view the world a little bit differently,

through a kind of a natural opening or door or something, and have secret twists and turns so that you feel like there's a level of exploration as you're taking this journey. You're kind of forgiving the reality of what surrounds you and entering a kind of fantasy world at some way. That's how I felt when I went into, there was a Willow House, a Willow Hut at the L.A. Natural History Museum that was built by Dave Lovejoy. Oh, yeah, my friend Dave. Yeah. They called it a Willow House. I always called it a Willow Hut. When you step inside it, it was, you know, maybe the size of a small bus, a little shuttle bus maybe standing up. But you instantly feel safe and more connected to nature. And yeah, the way that shafts of light will come through the branches, it's really otherworldly.

And at the same time, it feels very essential to what it is to be an animal on the planet. I think that's really true. The material itself conveys so much. And Patrick told me that placement of a sculpture is key. So if you isolate it too far from where people naturally walk, it's a little. little intimidating to approach. So he places them about a literal stones throw away from where people are already walking. You have to lead them there, say, it's okay to step off the sidewalk, which I think, again, is what artists do is tell people it's okay to step off the sidewalk.

You have to lead them there. Yeah, and find a new place. When you realize that being an artist was something that was going to be inevitable for you, as someone who was a maker really young, When you were deciding kind of what media you were going to work with, where was that click where you were like sticks, living things? I think you'd stumble into it in a way. You know, there's so many saplings in North Carolina along the roadways. They tend to spray now. But when I first started, there was just a world of saplings everywhere that maintenance people were constantly striving to keep down. So it's not unusual that a sculptor would see the potential of saplings.

along his own driveway, plentiful, renewable, and that you could continue to use them. Yeah. You know, it was a world of plenty. And then knowing that it had such a respected history, and indigenous tribes and animal life and children's play gave you inference to, you know, that how could you use it in a way to be suggestive and provocative and cause people to want to come look at it, you know, and talk to you about it and tell you the stories that they know from their own life. Yeah. And Patrick says that power plants and real estate development and utility companies tend to play nice if he

requests material from them as it's kind of a benefit to the community. And he likens it to borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbor and then being credited when people like the cake. So utility companies also do have to clear branches and understory around power lines to mitigate fire risk. And so if he's there to catch it and haul it away to make a sculpture, all the better. So power plants, indeed. Plus, we use volunteers. Yeah. And so we'll use community members to help us. You can get an ad in the newspaper telling people to come down, but it's better to have people invite their friends. Ah, of course. I worked on it, you know, come down here and take a look at it. Yeah. I helped build, when they replaced the Willow Hut at the Natural History Museum. Oh, really? Yeah, I was there.

I was there in a hat and gloves, and it meant a lot to me to know that even, you know, a few sticks, you know, I was there for an afternoon, just some of those sticks were I got to touch, you know. And when they took the original Willow Hut down, they've removed it, the sculpture from the garden, but they saved one twig of it for me because they knew that it meant a lot to me. And I actually named my company Willow Hut because I was in my accountant's office and I had to come up with a name. and I thought, well, what's a place that makes me feel really happy? Yeah, yeah. And so it's something that I remember and I carry with me. And thanks again to LA artist Dave Lovejoy and the Natural History Museum here in L.A. for making that sculpture. It's now gone. It was forever in my memory. And you can

look up the hashtag Willow Hut Wednesday to enjoy pictures from that era. And when I went to volunteer, my task was stripping the leaves off of these long, bushy willow rods. But I don't I don't even know if that's regional or customer or what. All I know is that it smelled good. I was in heaven. And I always wonder, like, where do the leaves go? And are you stripping the leaves as you go? Well, a lot of times we're gathering in the winter or on the shoulders of the season.

You know, sometimes we've worked in the summer and we have to take the leaves off. Sometimes we can be tricky if it's willow and lay it out on the ground and water it. And a lot of times the leaves will turn yellow and they'll just fall off. Oh. As for seasons, again, willows tend to live in the northern hemisphere. So in spring, they usually bust out leaves and flowers first. And their flowers are kind of these like football-shaped little spiky kush balls. And then as the days get shorter in autumn, they lose their leaves.

But yeah, sometimes Patrick and the crew kind of spritz them to encourage the leaves to just scaddle. We don't know how to do it, but sometimes it works. And now I understand, too, that it's easier to pull the blunt end. Yeah. And then as it tapers, it's easier to go, right? Well, we are always working with our volunteers and say, like, you start with the big end and pull it through. Yeah. You know, a lot of times I don't give people a lot of advice at first.

I'll say, well, like, why don't you try it? A lot of times volunteers work on the interior of the pieces. You can practice. You know, some people who work for us have a real gift and kind of a drawing style. They can visualize that and they can ad lib, you know. So most of the time, Sam and I touch the, he's my son and he's worked for me for a number of years. We will go and touch every single bit of the surface and rectify any little difference because we wanted to look really a certain way.

You don't see it. But subtly, we will lean things against each. other. So oftentimes, in the biggest sense, they're tripods. Ah. Or they're paired up. There's some way that we're trying to make a piece sound enough that people could go in without the danger of it collapsing on. Yeah. But, you know, baskets are very strong and then these are huge kind of basket-like shapes. And so they have real integrity themselves. Where have you been? Like how many, what's your passport like? Is it just a

just so stuffed? Yeah, well, we've made about 335 big pieces. Yeah. I'm kind of semi-retired at the moment. I used to travel for 10 months a year. Each piece takes three weeks to make. And so I'd be off a week, and then we'd start again. So for 40 years, I was never home.

When I was 78, I felt like I needed to slow down, not because we can't work, but because the planning, for these pieces takes two years often. And so when you get older, you're not sure you'll be around two years from now. Everything is more tentative. Are you 78? I'm 81 now. What? Yeah. At first, I thought you meant in 78. No, I'm so. You're 81? Yeah. I had no idea. I guess that sticks have been good to me. I mean, do you think that's staying outside and just get, do you think, I mean... It's staying outside, but also this is, this is like an athletic activity. It doesn't seem like it because we make it look like a normal person could be there and do it.

Yeah. But doing it eight hours a day for three solid weeks and then a week off and eight hours a day for another three weeks. You know, you stay in relatively good shape. Yeah. How many pounds do you think of sticks do you use for a big sculpture? We probably use, oh, maybe three or four tons. We generally order a tractor trailer loaded sticks. We're going to work in Japan.

And in February at a horticultural expo that's in Yokohama. So we're looking for saplings now, and we're telling them, well, they say, how many do you need? We're going to get willow from different farmers, different plots. And so we need a tractor trailer load. Are you or Sam afraid of heights? You can't be, right? No, we're not afraid of heights, but we generally work up to about 25 feet. Sometimes you can put a ladder on it and death defiantly get up.

higher than that. If we have to, we can go as many high as we need. I've made some towers where we would be working at 40 feet, or 50 feet. What kind of equipment do you have to use? Like, how many gloves? Do you have a favorite pair of clippers? Well, we use felt, I showed you my Felco Clippers. Yeah. I use Felco number two. It's the most universal. Felco is a great, there's some knockoffs of it that are pretty good, but Felco is the one that all the botanic gardens, all the folks that you see with a little hoster on, with their vocal clippers in there. That's what you need if you're going to be a serious stick worker.

What about gloves? Gloves. I've worn, I don't have my glove collection here because it's in a traveling show. But every time people work for me at the end of the installation, we get everybody to sign the gloves, including the mayor or whoever's there. And then we put them on the wall. And so they're in now a traveling exhibition. It's going to be opening again in the Cameron Museum down in Wilmington soon.

Oh, I love it. I maybe have 300 pairs of gloves. And if you're anywhere near Wilmington, North Carolina's Cameron Museum from November 26 to April 27, check out their exhibit. It's called Patrick's Pilgrimage. And it does feature some sculptures indoors and also 250 gloves signed by his volunteers over the years. And I saw some pictures. And imagine browsing like an upscale boutique of gloves, but they are all like well worn and misshapen.

It's so lovely. What kind do you use? Are they leather? You know, you're kind of always have to go with what's local. Uh-huh. So sometimes those local ones wear out. Sometimes they're the best ones you've ever put on your hands, you know, the blue mules from Montana. Yeah.

Also, you know, we work in freezing rain. we go somewhere and we work for three weeks. It doesn't matter whether the downpour or, you know, we worked in Dallas, Fort Worth. And during a few years ago when they had this incredible cold freeze and it dropped to zero. I remember. We were working that day when it was zero degrees and freezing rain. And so, you know, gloves are a big part of being able to persist. So, you know, we had insulated gloves and everything else you could think of on our bodies. Oh, my God. So, yeah, gloves are a big part of it. Yeah, I've gone through a lot of different brands of gloves. Have you ever found any weird bugs or animals? Well, a lot of times, if you're working in a museum, you know, they're really afraid. Because we worked at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

I mean, they've got these old master's photos. I mean, you can't get bugs in those frames. So, you know, sometimes you have to treat the sticks, maybe with gas, inert gas. Being careful about selecting sticks, so usually there are no bugs in the green saplings. But say if they're connected to a stump and you cut it, you might cut a bad piece off that would have a powder post beetle in it. So being very careful about what you do. Still in all, there are crickets and stuff like that. So you have to depest those.

They cannot go inside. If you're working outside, it's fine. Do you ever get ticks? Well, this is the gathering saga of ticks. sticks, bees, snakes, alligators. You know, if you're gathering down in South Carolina in the swamp, you better be in the winter. Oh, or else there's... The gators and so forth.

And then it's kind of disconcerting when the neighbors stop and tell you don't go in there. There's too many moccasins there. Oh. And you think, well, that's the only place we can get these sticks. We're going to have to go in there, you know? What do you do? Do you just wear big shoes? You beat a nice path into it and then be very careful about where you put.

your hands, you know. And if you do see a rattlesnake or something, then, you know, people, everybody jumps on the truck and it's you and somebody else out there cutting, you know, hoping not to die during this installation, you know. I do. I, you know, reading your book, I've read of snakes maybe falling from the top, a snake in the bathroom, and then it's interesting that you have a friendly snake. Yeah, we have a pet snake. I've tried to show you, but it's on a holiday, right? It lives under a lap that I have my pool filter under there. And so it sets on this little pan under there. And it's a very, very nice snake. Very sweet snake. Can I ask you a couple questions from listeners? Sure. Okay, great. And if you need any visual aids for this episode,

feel free to check out Patrick's Instagram at Patrick Doherty Sculpture, which will link right in the show notes. And while Sam, his son assists and co-builds his sculptures, his daughter, Eileen, has been on hand to help out with Patrick's growing Instagram audience. He told me, like, through this chuckle that he's made sculptures all of his life, but what went viral the past few weeks is a video of him showing off of big, sweet, non-venomous snake that lives in his fish pond. And he says on the post, I'm very fond of her, and I'm always careful not to startle her. So tell him you love his work at Patrick Doherty Sculptor on Instagram. And each episode, we donate to a cause of theologist's choosing. And this week, Patrick would love for it to go to the NC Conservation Network, which is a

statewide network of over 60 community and environmental justice organizations focused on protecting North Carolina's environment and public health and creating a North Carolina committed to improving and protecting the state's vast natural resources. And we'll link the North Carolina Conservation Network right in our show notes too. Thank you to sponsors of ologies for making these donations possible every week. All right, let's stick to the mission here. And And let's get to your questions, patrons. We had a couple of questions that I thought were so sweet. Claire Bear wanted to ask for Dean, if you have any theories of why willow trees are so bouncy,

when you're trying to bend them, do you find that certain sticks have more bounce, more flex? That's absolutely right. So when we go out looking for sticks in the woods, we'll flex a stick and to see how much flexing it has in it. Some sticks dry really quickly, like an ash stick is already kind of dry. They don't flex so well. So a lot of times flexing is our game with various sticks. And sometimes we need the side limbs on because they're what catches other limbs. So if you drag a stick through the wood, you see what I mean.

Everything catches on it. Yeah. That's basically that infuriating tendency to tangle with other things is what we're using to hold things together. So we like a lot of side limbs that helps entangle. one thing to another. So yeah, flexibility. Not all willows are flexible. Some are very unflexable. And some willows, the side limbs, drop off if you touch them. Oh. So our special need is to have flexible sticks with lots of side limbs that stay on. Uh-huh. So we're looking for bouncy sticks all the time. Bouncy or the better. Cat Paul and Azia Hall both wanted to know,

Kat says, seeing as how willows can be brittle and don't live very long compared to other trees, why do you think they were chosen for anniversaries? They intertwine easily. They're an easy stick. The bark is slick, so the bark slides beside another one easy enough. They're not sharp in any way. There's a kind of a very nice end to them. They're usually a little bit weak on the end, so they're not pokey as pokey.

So Willow, I'm sure everyone, if they have it, would choose that as a stick. they're probably going to, oh, well, if I have a big bunch of will, I'm going to go use that. And I looked this up. Willow was chosen as a ninth anniversary gift because it symbolizes the flexibility that marriage requires. I guess bloom wherever the swamp takes your stumps and just bend in the breezes and the floods. For more on strength and flexibility, too, you can listen to our osteology episode about bones. Strong but flexible gets a job done, people. Wait, why are willows so bendy though? Well, according to this one 2009 paper, having a large number of these flexible shoots, having a ton of them, helps to dissipate the force of the water through streams and rivers. And that intense root system also helps the willows stay stable in floods and winds. So not unlike last minute tickets that you got for Cirque de Soleil in Vegas, the bendier, the better and the more the merry. Arela Zarina wanted to know, is it true that they grow from even a small cutting? Well, this person says I'm reading a historical book about a family that chooses the surname Willow at some point, which symbolically became important because they managed to survive through thick and thin and wars and peace and hiding. I looked everywhere for this book until my fingertips were cracked and bleeding before I finally just messaged patron Arela Zarina to admit my defeat. And Arela was like, oh yeah, don't worry. It's in Latvian. Okay. Never would have guessed.

set. So thankfully, they were there to clarify that. And it's a book called Saveayum, and it's informally translated to For the Fam or something like For Our Own. And it's by Villis Vittal's, and they fled Germany and then South America during the Russian occupation. And Fittal's means, yes, willow. And the book notes on page 10 that the willow is a vigorous tree. It sprouts roots and shoots even from a hewn fence post. But you mentioned that willow farms, they can just keep growing. They grow from a stool, what they call the stump, and they copse it. They cut it down to the base. And every time it grows out again, you get twice as many willows. Because they make a lot more each time. So some of these stumps are huge. And then they produce hundreds of shoots. They come off of the stumps. But in order

to plant, a lot of times you just cut a little piece of willow that's six inches. inches long. If you stick it in the ground and keep it wet, it will root. Really? Yeah. And so it immediately starts rooting. And like a lot of times they just go down the row and stick these sticks in. And when they try to refurbish stream banks and so forth, they simply take not a plant with a root on it, but just a little piece of stick and stick it down. And if there's enough moisture in the soil, these things will start growing immediately. And just a side note, that medusa snake sprouting from a decapitated stump is called vegetative reproduction, and it goes hard as hell. And as far as those roots strong enough to withstand a water current, they are stoleniferous, meaning that they can grow in a line like a spine, and they

sprout shoots upward as they continue outward. And a few of you asked about phyto remediation. I'm looking at you, Smiley Kylie, Bruchatini, MADS, Jill Landry, AJ, and for some question asker, alphabet soup, who wrote, please, please, please explain how willow trees are used in phyto remediation. And according to that earlier, 2009 paper in the journal Environmental Engineering, shrub willows have been used for remediation because they can deal with flooding to help contain groundwater runoff and pick up contaminants like extra nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer, as well as heavy metals. And then when it's cut and burned as biomass for power plants, the metals are just left behind in the ash.

And those bonkers, strong roots can also control erosion. And the shrubs are essentially affordable housing for so many critters. They can also act as snow fences. So will reports come out later that transplanted Willow is invading and taking over native flora? Probably, I don't know. All the better to harvest and build sculptures with, right? Well, what if you want to grow a house in your yard? There's been some artists that have done some interesting work with living willow structures.

Yes. That's a thing that's predominantly in England and living willow fences and so forth. And a lot of those are just started by sticking a stick down in the ground and then tending to it by making sure it has plenty of water. A bunch of people actually wanted to know about that. Poison Charios, Miranda, Panda, Gardner Gabby, Hadside. Hydro wanted to know, has asked, I've seen people use them to build fences by planting sticks and then just letting them grow together. Does that really work? It seems like it would require a lot of maintenance. But how would you even start to do that? Do you have to sort of go in every week or so

and nudge them? So I attended a situation in England in which a couple of artists had helped a school build a huge dome out of sticks. They had a big circle, marked it out on the ground, and then went around and stuck a little bit larger stick in the ground without any root on it. And then they watered it and got it going. And then the students would kind of weave it as it grew more until they had a pretty good dome. And they did have to trim. Either the students went out and maintained it by taking the new limbs that came out and twisting them into the matrix. So it became fuller over time.

So it looked very good. But you can do some very nice structures, particularly for kids and outdoor patios and a lot of botanic gardens have taken on making all kinds of passageways and labyrinths and so forth by taking and lining willow out and patterns and then having it grow and have people walk through it. And you have to have pretty wet soil for that, right? Either that or a good sprinkling system. I mean, but if you lived in boggy area, you could easily make something. thing. Yeah, unfortunately for Los Angeles. Not much water. Not going to happen. Actually, L.A. has a variety of biomes, so I shouldn't say that. We have wetlands and swamps, riparian ecology. And in fact, the very well-known central street of L.A. near Beverly Hills, Los Yanniga, means the swamp,

because it was one. And then it was drained to build mansions and malls and plastic surgery offices and also my dentist. But let's talk once again about having. having a pet willow, eight ounce shrimp bin, Jill Landry, Amanda Dragoorah, Wandering Wyatt, Michelle Volk, so many questions, dad jokes crack me up, and Azia Hall, who asked, how far away from the home is safe, we're building, and I want to plan out a good spot to meditate beneath a weeping willow. Well, okay, let's talk about it. Remember how strong those roots are, right? Remember how much they tend to love water? So that is not a great combo. And some plumbers and tree experts say at least 20 meters or 60 feet from the foundation of your house or any

pipes. So ask a plumber or just heed the caution of fellow patron Ted Visian who shared that they can verify as someone who spent thousands on replacement sewer lines after a willow tree filled my house's original ones with roots. You don't want to mess up your sewer lines. people. But hey, Willows, they just want to leave their mark in the world, okay? Speaking of, Isaiah Hall wanted to know if you have a stick tattoo. I don't have a stick tattoo. I don't have any, but I've got plenty of, I would say, I've got a little place on my forehead where a stick quackered me. Are you serious? And sometimes when they say, will you sign your work, I just bite it. You just bite it. I leave my teeth mark on a stick.

I say, well, now I've signed it. Have you heard of tattoos that are stick and poke? No. A stick and poke tattoo is instead of using a gun, it's just a needle and ink. It's kind of an old-fashioned one. Oh, yeah. Well, and you can stain yourself with different kinds of bark, too. If you want to be bare-handed and use it over a period of time, you'll get a nice leathery brown color.

Well, especially with walnut, right? Yeah, well, that's true. You could make your own hen of tattoos. With walnut. walnut bark, and most all barks have a stain to them. Don't do this because of germs, okay? Also, yeah, black walnut juice can stain, which would be amazing if it didn't also have phytotoxic compounds that can lead to a rash or allergic reaction.

So again, just like get some henna. I'm too tired for you to experiment on yourself and then sue me. You know, one of the things we didn't mention is that there's a smell to different trees. And so sometimes with willow, if you conglomerate it in a big sculptures, it's sometimes it be initially, it's kind of overwhelming. But there's a sense of enhancing the natural world by as you brush through something, even if it gets dried out, you're kind of reinvigorating the aroma. So I think that part of the enhancement for people coming and participating, walking through is that they have the aroma of the natural world, something they recognize from

a camping trip or just brushing through on a walk in the woods. You know, they've done studies that the smell of trees is very healthy for people, mentally and physically. I could believe that. Believe it. October 2025, Journal, Nature. Title, psychological and physiological responses to smells from nature. Potential health benefits for urban dwellers.

The findings? So 30 studies, they went through them. They showed that exposure to smells from nature, emitted from real natural sources, positively influences human psychological and physiological responses. These include reducing stress levels, inducing relaxation, and enhancing positive emotions and effective states. Also, if you're wondering what willow taste like, or at least white willow, it might have a bitter flavor. It contains salicin, which then turns into salic acid in your tummy. and that is what acetylacillacidic acid or aspirin is based on. So yes, human beings were chewing willow bark and making willow tea for thousands of years for pain relief

and a fever reducer before Bayer got their dirty little Monsanto mitts on it. So listen to our forest ecology episode and look for some creepy crawlies. And on ologies, we always tell people to go huff some bark. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, so much of our background is buried in our subconscious. I mean, a thousand. thousands of years are somehow part of that, not accessible per se, but affecting. Yeah, but we're critters just like the rest of them, right? Yeah. Let's see, Aurella's Arena

wanted to know, well, wonders what Willows would be thinking about if we could hear their thoughts. Do you think sticks have a certain spirit, do you ever get a vibe from a certain pile of sticks where you're like, this is a friendly vibe or this one's sort of like a kind of cranky? Well, we want to say we're using you well. Yeah. And that, you know, that we haven't killed your stump. You can make more next year. There is a way that there's a renewal thing that's part of it.

And alongside volunteers, Patrick has also paired up with indigenous community members for site-specific installations. They've gone out and asked, could we use Willow? Would you allow us to use Willow? Yeah. So then sometimes we were in northern Illinois University. and we were going to have to talk to the Lakota's there. And they had a difficult time naming it. They said we could use Willow at the university.

There was a synergy there. If you use Willow, you're going to have to let us name it. And the problem was that they couldn't figure out exactly what dancing Willow meant. Oh. Because they wanted to name it something about Willow dancing. Does that mean that the Willow is being blown in the wind? and it's thereby moving, or is it animated in its own right because of its own desire to be part of the sculpture? Yeah.

A more of a poetic basis for naming it. And so somehow by talking to the many elders of the tribe, they came up with a deep thought about how to name it and give it the sense that the willow itself wanted to participate. Oh, I think that's so beautiful. And then did it end up being called Dancing Willow? Oh, and I might be wrong, but I tried to translate this to Lakota, which would be Chen Shasha Wachipi. And of course, so many indigenous groups and people all over the world have their own stories about Willow. The Osage Nation has one about a young man seeking wisdom from a willow, asking it for advice like a grandfather. Again, in Japanese culture, a willow represents a woman. Many cultures use willows, particularly the weeping species, to symbolize grief. And willow sticks have been woven into caskets for thousands of years, becoming popular in medieval times. You can also just buy one now for like a grand. What else? Patrons, Gia Capper, Rob Wallace, Nathan, Brooklyn Treehugger, Poison Cheerios, Hillary Zimmerman, Hall, Azeal Hall, Rowan Tree, and Redheaded scientist. And I hope Jay wanted to know if willow trees are found in folklore and myths, you know,

and all the stories of people passing by talking about twigs and sticks while you're working, have you heard any folk. or myths that people have shared? Well, if you go to a library, say the Morton Arboretum in Chicago has a huge tree library, thousands and thousands of books about trees that have been donated to them, some of them really old. And what they pointed out to me is there's a lot of folklore that imagines people being born from trees. In other words, we weren't created by God somehow. we were the product of tree birth, something, you know. And so you can read a lot of fables in which people feel like they were issued by your mother, a big sapling.

I mean, you know. Yeah, your little acorn. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and that's the basis of the human race. But the inference from talking to folks that had a little ability and had read through a lot of this lore, that, you know, there's a credible belief among a lot of people that, you know, we were tree-based. And the stories in folklore about willow trees are as numerous as the shoots that jut up from a riverbank being like, hey, I'm here.

And first-time question asker, Jennifer Zhang said, willows are such beautiful trees. My mom told me that there's folklore that willow trees catch the ghosts and the spirits dwell inside them. Is there such folklore? Can they still haunt you if the willow is no longer weeping, they ask? I cannot give you a good ghost forecast. I can't tell you that, but I can't tell you that folks think willows got their emo rep just by being droopy in general, or for how the leaves shed what looks like tear drops in the rain. And patron Rob H said, I recently read Buffalo Birdwoman's Garden. And Buffalo Birdwomen, they say, describes using willow sticks and bows for all kinds of traditional work. Why was the willow such an

important plant to native people on the plains. And from what I've read, Rob H, Buffalo Bird Woman was of the Hadatsa Nation, and Willow was so flexible and strong and abundant that it was used to weave lodges and all kind of material items. And Hadatsa actually means people of the Willow. And some tales say that that was because the Creator wanted the Hadatsa peoples to be as numerous as the Willow shoots lining the Missouri River. So what you're going to want to do, perhaps, is get a copy of Willow by Alison Seim, published by Reaction Books, which is 240 pages of Willow folklore. We'll link it on our website at alleyway.com slash ologies slash Salixology. But yes, humans have been down with little safe spaces made from plants since well before we were humans. And while

there are plenty of hybrids of weeping willow, the only true one is Salix Babylonica. And it's native to drier areas in Eurasia. And while most trees do reach upwards, these willows have a distinctly kind of like posture. They can grow 80 feet, but they have the same lifespan as your cousin who vapes, 40, 75 years tops. Now, some of the weeping willow silhouette is just straight aesthetics and breeding. They look cool that way, so people made more of them. But a June 2024 paper in the journal Plant Pathology titled, What Makes a Tree Weep? Revealed that one of the key players in directing growth of the branches is the hormone oxen. whose uneven distribution causes the plant to change the direction of the growth or branching or bending with or against gravity.

So willows, they're just like us. They're flooded with hormones, weeping. They scare off children because they're full of ghosts. Now, I hope that helps, Lana Schuster, Chicka Chinese chicken, Kate, Clay Troyer, Lynette Davila, Helen A., Megan Ratcliffe, Meg Saluga, eating dog hair for a living, Abby L, one-eyed octopus, Dylan V, Indy, Mike Ski, and Maya Catherine. You said sex. Speaking of weeping. Did you ever weep at the giving tree by Shelds?

Man, that's a real weeper, isn't it? That's a way. Yeah, my kids and the woman that who was my office manager for years, she was a preschool teacher and she had the giving tree. And we've often talked about the giving tree in terms of real life situations and families, you know. Oof. I mean, what a parable of codependence to an enabling. But also it's beautiful that the work that you do is shoots that are renewed and making something out of an area that's been cut down already.

Or that's in the works to be cut down. So if they're going to put a shopping center there and you're able to use some of these things to reinvigorate people's idea about the natural world. I thought it was really sweet that Ellie Stodin just said that hiding out under a mini weeping willow. my garden as a kid was tippy top cozy secluded den and i think it's funny that so many people are just feel very cozy about it but i wanted to ask you know last last listener question here via kieran h Lauren harder quill Sloan Aaron White all crafty folks if you have any tips for starting to craft with sticks or let's say that someone myself wanted to make a small structure Any tips on how to get started?

Well, one thing is if you can just find some material, and I think for most people, the finding resource is a big thing. So if you have a stream behind your house and nobody minds, or if you are going to clear your woods out, and you have a kind of an even bunch of sticks, they just came from the same spot, so they're all of the same variety,

or they all grew in the same way, so that they're all the same height, you know, given a good bunch of sticks, then you want to just start messing with them a little bit, you know? And one thing always to remember is start with a structure, some kind of structure. You know, maybe there's some trees around and you could start interweaving around trees or dig some holes in the ground and put some sticks down in there and start making a structural base. But experimentation is the game. and, of course, you know, mimicking. So you can look at your bird nest outside your house and I wonder how they do that.

And you're not going to learn unless you pick a stick up and try to see if you bend it, what will happen. Oftentimes when we've worked with children, I have been so impressed with watching them discover things that I didn't know. Like what? So if you take a stick, two sticks, maybe, and one of them is kind of small, and you just, twist your fingers together, all of a sudden you see one stick kind of twisting around the other. And then I say, let me have that. And they kind of pull it and it won't come apart, you know. Once we were at the Los Angeles Botanic Garden, we worked there in a group of American Indians. They have a medicine garden there. And I was working near there. So they came down and they decided to

take some saplings and sticks from the garden. And they decided to make a bow and air a bow string that would never break. And they all sat there the whole day and they did this with their fingers around these fibers and then at the end of the day they had a bow string that purportedly would

never break. Oh, that's gorgeous. Everything was made from a little small fibers that were conglomerated into a bigger, more known an object, you know. So I think that they know people haven't gotten a little bit of the material world and tried to work with it.

You know, I have had an enhanced life. And my life has come through being outdoors and using natural materials and trying to see how they work. And the fantasy that goes with that and also the problem solving of trying to present something in a space that seems so natural. And using sticks in a way that make you feel like that they're floating and that they are moving like water or that it couldn't possibly be. that a person made this. Yeah, it's incomprehensible when you look at it. You think, I'm so glad this exists, but it looks as though it came from an illustrated kids' book about where a mouse lives, but they're huge.

And, you know, it's just letting sticks kind of exert themselves and present themselves in the natural way that they are. Yeah. And being a kind of facilitator and trying to reach for some of the subconscious feelings that people have about the natural world and let those somehow play out into the surfaces of these pieces. Yeah. So that people really do want to come running. Is there something that is a challenge every time? Or is it like losing your clippers and you don't know where you put them? Or is it jet lag? Like, what's the hardest? Well, I tell you, you lose your clippers. You go out of your

mind. If they fall into the mix somewhere, you need two pair. And yeah, you can, it, it, It's so disturbing. You can't sleep. I think that the best part of the job is the day that you arrive and you have your idea and you see the site and you've remembered how you felt about it when you first saw it and you know that that's the feeling that you want to get back to. And you have this big pile of sticks over here. There are potential materials to do anything that you want with.

And then you enter the doldrums and that is that you work hard day after day. It's really boring. It's hot or it's cold. And you just keep slugging away and you're tired and you're cranky. And you have to be nice because you're on site. People are asking you question all the time. But the next best moment is when you're finished. And you know, and you've brought it up to a point where you think you just can't do it anymore.

You know, it's like a jeweler says that a polish is nothing but a sense of finer and finer scratches. And so, you know, sticks are kind of scratchy. they're kind of sketchy. And so when you've brought it to a level that you cannot improve it that much more, you say, hey, I'm finished. And Sam would always say, well, are we finished? And I'd say, I'm going to, I will start saying in the morning because it's the end of the third week. We always finish on time.

And I said, Sam, I'm feeling like it's getting finished. I think it is. And like two hours before we were finished, I said, tell the volunteers that we're just about to finish. They don't want to finish. Yeah. We want to finish. They don't want to stop. Yeah.

Because it's been such a good, fun time. And so it's like, okay, we're going to finish. And in an hour before I say, you know, we're almost finished. Everybody's polishing by then. They're going around and fixing up and tucking in and trying to make the surface look homogenous in some way. Okay, we're finished now. And then we all step back. we have to have a circumambulation and we walk all the way around the piece and we look at it.

Everybody there and sometimes people will be waiting for us to finish like in New Harmony, Indiana. We finished and the whole town came. Oh. And we had an impromptued opening. And everybody walked around. We said, this is what we meant to do and this is what we did. What do you all think, you know? And so, you know, that's another huge high point because there's so much friendship involved.

and oftentimes, you know, people will come bring their neighbors, and it's really fun. Oh, how wonderful. Well, if you ever need volunteers, let me know. Thank you. I think that you should go home and get yourself some willow. I think I might need to, yeah. It's not as hard as you think. All right.

I've got to get my clippers and my gloves. That's all you need. That's all I need. And a good idea. Yeah, and a good idea. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. So ask wonderful people weepy questions because if you didn't get yourself across the country

to meet them, would you regret it? Of course. I'm so thankful to Patrick for letting me come and visit him and Linda and Sam and The Snake. Again, follow him at Patrick Dordy Scopter on Instagram. He is wonderful. You can see all sorts of work by him. You can also find out more about him at alleywar.com slash ologies slash salixology, where we have a ton of links. and notes for that. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at Alley Ward on both. We have Smollogies, which are shorter kid-friendly episodes, all ages. Those are in their own feed, wherever you go to find podcasts. Thank you to Aaron Talbert for managing the Ologies podcast Facebook group, Avaline Malik, makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does our website,

our scheduling producer, bending everything into the right part of the calendar is Noelle Dilworth, our managing director who gets up on scaffolds to oversee everything is Susan Hale. And of course, the flexible and strong Jake Chafee and lead editor, Mercedes-Maitland, put this whole thing together. Nick Thorburn made the theme music. If you stick around until the very end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And if somewhere in the middle of this outro, things started sounding a little bit weird, that is because I work at a co-working space and I was in the sound booth there.

And they closed and they straight up were like, I'm so sorry you have to go. And I had like 30 seconds more of this outro to record. And oh my God. Oh my gosh. Totally. One second. Oh my God. I have to go. Oh my gosh. No, no, no. Credit to them. I was absolutely like five, 10 minutes over time. So that's on me. So I am in the front yard of my co-working space. I'm ducked under a bush right now. Traffic's going by. It's rush hour. You want to see how under a bush I am? That's some leaves I'm standing under. I'm literally hiding under a phicus right now, which is seems fitting for this episode. And, uh, that's my secret is I'm, uh, not the best at time management, but I do love the job.

Okay, go look at Patrick's work. Huff some bark, bend a twig. Get off your phone. Get under a bush. All right. Bye.