Eschscholzia californica, California Poppy
Bombus vosnesenskii, Yellow-faced Bumble bee
Artist: Sarah Red-Laird
Title: Bee Habitat in Cyanotype 82
Location: Trisaetum’s Coast Range Vineyard, Oregon
Flower: Eschscholzia californica, California Poppy
Bee: Bombus vosnesenskii, Yellow-faced Bumble Bee
Materials: Cyanotype, barnwood
Field Season: 2022
Composed: 2024
The Artist
Sarah Red-Laird is a melittologist, artist, conservationist, and founder and co-director of the nonprofit organization, Bee Regenerative.
She spends the colder months living near her Southern Oregon art studio and “field season” in Montana and South Dakota in her campervan/bee lab studying bees, bison, cattle, and the plants and soil that connect them.
She works with cyanotype to create images of the flowers and charismatic mega and mini-fauna she studies.
Sarah lives her life outside of the bounds of convention to be close to the natural world where the sky is big, the water talks, the air hums, and the ground rumbles with buffalo bellows. Through her art, she hopes to bring you closer to this world, as well.
The Work
Trisaetum Winery and Bee Regenerative have been collaborating through the “Bee Friendly Vineyards” program since 2019. This is a vintner and melittologist-driven collaboration led by Trisaetum’s James Frey and BR’s Sarah Red-Laird.
Together they are letting data collected from the vineyard’s soil, grapes, bees, flowers, and microbiology inform management decisions. They believe that a vineyard can concurrently produce stellar fruit and create an ecological refugia for some of our most important (and imperiled) pollinators – the bees.
Our collaboration has resulted in decreasing chemical inputs and increasing wildflowers through planting seeds along fencerows and headlands and reducing, or eliminating, mowing and tillage in and around the vineyards.
Because grapes are self-pollinating, vineyard managers often don’t consider creating pollinator-friendly landscapes. However, bees have an important and undervalued role outside of cash crop pollination services. They are also essential in building soil health, though ensuring the reproduction of plants that fix nitrogen naturally and support healthy mycorrhiza communities, essential in grapevine production.
Bees are an indicator species of a healthy vineyard and an in-tact environment. Ecologically speaking, a healthy community of bees is an indication of the life-cycle loop coming back together.
Learn more about the winery here, and make sure to visit for a tasting on your next trip to Oregon’s Willamette Valley wine country!
The Piece
California poppy, Eschscholzia californica, is an iconic west coast flower - made (more) famous by influencers flocking to Bear Valley and the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve during the last “superbloom” event of 2019.
Well before this flower was in our social media feeds, it was adored and utilized by the native people of what is now called Southern California.
“Lizard described to Coyote the California poppies out on the islands: “When you see it, it is as if the sun itself is on the ground.””
- Chumash Ethnobotany, by Janice Timbroo
This flower is a match made in heaven for bumble bees, Bombus, which is it’s most common pollinator, but in Trisaetum Winery’s vineyards, we’ve also observed honey bees (Apis mellifera), small carpenter bees (Ceratina), yellow-faced bees, (Hylaeus), and sweat bees (Lasioglossum) loving on this flower.
I encourage anyone on the west coast to cover their properties with this flower — which will give you a burst of joy and the bees a burst of nutrition in the most arid of landscapes. California poppies are like the succulents of the flower world, the more your ignore them, the better they do. Read this article from the Spruce on Cal poppy propagation.
The Process
The “cyanotype” process was developed by British astronomer and chemist Sir John Herschel in 1842. It’s a photographic process that uses iron salts to create a deep blue image. Initially developed for reproduction of his own scientific notes and drawings, it was popularized by his friend, Anna Atkins, a botanist who published a book illustrated with photographs using the cyanotype process, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
My attraction to cyanotype printing may be related to my affinity for the scientific method. Though the subject of each piece is steeped in story and complexity, the image itself cannot be manipulated by perception. It simply is a print of simple reality.
This is the hook. As humans, we crave simplicity.
But agriculture is not simple, it’s complicated, complex, and contextual.
The striking cyan-blue entices the viewer to the piece and then invites a deeper inquiry.
I hope each viewer makes the journey to my website to learn about Bee Regenerative’s work with bees on agricultural landscapes and also where to connect with me as I travel around the country speaking on the beautifully complicated connections between bees, bison, cattle, ourselves and everything in-between.