Precious Cargo

Botanical Collage 2025 Rod Glover                                                                                                                    

Interview by Pam Parziale July 1 2025

Rod Glover’s hand hovers over the heavy archival paper, a deep crimson blossom of a wild rose glides into place as he releases the tweezer, “my second hands,” says the botanical artist. The quest is to capture a palette of colors at their moment of high intensity. Soon a cloud of pale blue miniature blossoms drifted over the page.

The plant material has been drying for days under layers of aerated cardboard. The studio is absent of humidity even on this hot sultry day. The color is more likely to be retained in a dry environment, Rod explains, and he wants to select species that complement and contrast with one another. “Everything has its moment, and the color tells nature’s story,” he says.

The artist spent childhood summer days on his grandparents’ farm, roaming the fields, exploring the woods, and pulling weeds from the summer garden. Ancestors on both sides of his family tree encouraged his creativity and his curiosity about nature. Rod became a collector; it seems nothing escaped his notice, thirty different varieties of grasses, timothy to fleabane. At the shore, he filled his pockets with shells, tiny stones, and seaweed.

During his college years, Rod said his vision began to coalesce around an awareness of the complexity of forms and shapes as part of the natural chaos of living things. The choices he makes for the plant life for each botanical print reveal both the natural order and the chaos.

The Mandalas are complex arrangements of flora and fauna, grasses and herbs. The patterns recede into space, and the designs seem to move as the negative space becomes as important as the botanical itself. Now I understand why these botanical prints are named Mandalas, meditations on “ephemeral works that are forever in the process of change,” Rod says.

Almost as an afterthought, Rod tells a story. A friend brought him a tiny box filled with four-leaf clovers collected over the lifetime by a dear grandmother.  Would Rod preserve them for his friend’s grandmother as she transitioned into a small, assisted living space? And the botanical artist took the precious cargo and pulled his ancestors memory into the process begun decades earlier on the family farm. What I saw were lovely shades of green quatrefoils waltzing across the cold press paper.