In winter, when it seems nothing interesting is decorating the northern Illinois landscape, I like to visit a free outdoor sculpture show at a local natural area. I can walk to this outdoor museum and observe sculptures I’d never see in spring and summer, and sometimes even free music is provided.
One of my favorite winter sculptures is the milkweed pod. In spring and summer, common milkweed plants burst with beautiful pink flowers. But come fall and winter, they look completely different. In fall, the plant has large, brownish, horn-shaped pods that hold silk and seeds tightly inside. As fall turns to winter, the pods split and release the silk upon which the seeds float to nearby soil to plant themselves. Often, adventurous children or adults help nature along by prodding the pods open, and blowing the seeds in the silk into the wind.
Now in winter, the pods are open and barren of seeds and silk. But they have lovely and interesting textures. Curved half-pods, rough to the touch, cling to the stems in an artistic arrangement. An orange hue paints the inside of the half pod. One of the pods has a thin orange membrane in the interior, with a few seeds suspended within.
There’s also a history and conservation lesson in these sculptures. The fibrous 3- to 4-foot stems were used by earlier peoples to create rope and twine. They also used the milkweed sap to treat rashes and other ailments, and parts of the plant were added to soups and stews.
These sculptures also represent a testament to helping the environment. Milkweed is a host plant for the monarch butterfly, whose numbers are declining.
I see no monarchs on this cold day, but I do encounter a group of taller sculptures. Thin stalks reaching 8- or 9-feet tall are adorned with alternating brown spiked balls. These compass plants were laden with huge, green incised leaves and lemon yellow flowers in July.
They’re still easily identifiable in winter by their unusual skeletal-like shapes. Standing by the compass plant sculptures, I hear the cheery melody of a singing goldfinch, the perfect musical backdrop to the outdoor museum. These goldfinches may still find seeds within the leftover, decaying buds, and their presence atop the plants is a lovely sight. The “yank, yank” call of the white-breasted nuthatch adds to the musical ambience.
Another piece of artwork in this natural area is a tightly bunched group of shorter plants with many small, round balls atop each stalk. They remind me of buttons, and I smiled remembering a button museum in Gurnee that closed years ago. They are the seed heads of bee balm, and like the compass plants, provide meals to birds in winter.
This year, little snow has fallen, but in other years the sculptures have been decorated with white drifts giving them a different look. Still, you can find some ice crystals that appear as if an artist had added them on after finishing the sculpture.
The outdoor museum’s centerpiece, a frozen pond, creates an opaque canvas for art work. Atop the cold sheet of ice are thin, long white streaks, as well as small floristic drawings resembling nearby plants. The artists at work are the wind and creaking of the ice as temperatures rise and fall. As winter enters into spring, little puddles of open water add to the ice mosaic on the pond.
Ice lends itself to the creation of art, not just by natural changes in temperature and precipitation in winter, but also by artists who see beauty in a block of frozen water. Lake Geneva in Wisconsin sponsors an ice sculpting contest annually in winter. Artists built basic forms by pouring warm water over blocks of ice. Then they use chainsaws, chisels and more water to create the detailed sculpture, often resembling wildlife, such as deer, fish and bears.
Warm winters the past few years have canceled some of the outdoor ice sculpture events. Snow sculpting contests, once a central part of the annual winter fest at Volo Bog, have not been held for several years. Not enough snow has fallen recently to give the artists a workable canvas.
But, we can still experience winter’s natural art by taking a walk on a cold day to a field or woods or pond. It’s a perfect way to stave off the doldrums of what we sometimes think is a gloomy season, and to remind us that spring is much more joyful when followed by a cold, icy winter.
Sheryl DeVore has worked as a full-time and freelance reporter, editor and photographer for the Chicago Tribune and its subsidiaries. She’s the author of several books on nature and the environment and can be reached at sheryldevorewriter@gmail.com.
