Video
Cypress Cathedral
Descriptive Transcript
Description Narrator: A group of alligators thrash into the water. Fish swim around underwater vegetation. A controlled fire burns a habitat. A bird appears in a hole in a dead tree. A ranger gives a guided canoe tour. Aerial footage of Mangroves. A snail glides along a tree branch.
Everglades National Park. National Park Service logo.
Cypress Cathedral.
A view of a Cypress Dome Habitat from a car window. A snake lays coiled on a downed log in a cypress forest. A bromeliad on a tree branch.
Kathleen: Whoops. [Humming] Wow, that is so cool!
Dick: Wow!
Description Narrator: Kathleen and Dick walk through water in a cypress forest examining the endangered Cowhorn orchid.
Kathleen: Do you want to see the coolest things about this orchid here that we found out after looking at it. See how this is not a flower.
Dick: Oh my gosh!
Kathleen: This is a kind of a bract here. I just can’t imagine what it is doing here.
Description Narrator: The leaves of the orchid are yellow and green with reddish-brown spots.
Dick: This is an amazing place. We call it our cypress cathedral.
Description Narrator: Kathleen trips in a hole under the water.
Kathleen: Whoops! There’s that same hole that I fell into before.
Dick: You never learn do you, dear? [Laughter]
Description Narrator: Text: Kathleen and Dick have been volunteers at Everglades National Park for eight years leading ranger tours and assisting researchers.
Kathleen is also a botanical illustrator.
Samples of Kathleen’s work, in pencil and black ink.
Kathleen: You’re here in our trailer in the community of Pine Island where the volunteers, and the rangers, and other support people live.
Description Narrator: Kathleen flips through pages of her portfolio at a table outside their trailer.
Kathleen: And we are here in the Everglades National Park during winter, or the dry season. You know, usually what I do is I take the plant and I pose it here in the studio. Studio, you know…maybe not call it a studio.
Description Narrator: Kathleen stands at the door to their trailer.
Kathleen: So then, I make the drawing, and then with a light table I turn it into an ink rendering.
The Cowhorn orchid will probably take me six weeks to two months to do in watercolor. It is a process of just deeper and deeper observation.
Description Narrator: Back at the Cypress Dome, Dick sits on a portable stool taking notes on a notebook in his lap. Kathleen stands next to a tree closely examining the bark, with the Cowhorn orchid in the foreground.
A closeup of Kathleen wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a Volunteer National Park Service patch. She matches color swatches to the plant and reads off numbers to Dick.
Text: They are both retired professors from Massachusetts.
Kathleen shows her sketchbook to the camera. Various angles and closeups of the plant are sketched in pencil.
Kathleen: Try to get the best… Tried to get some close ups, some real studies of the different elements. So, in here we have the pseudobulbs and the flowers. And a look inside to see the parts of the flower, you know, the sexual parts. This is the capsule. Looking at the leaves of the orchid. Trying to get a realistic representation of the actual plant, but in small.
Description Narrator: Close-up views of the parts of the orchid plant that Kathleen is explaining.
Kathleen: Because I am going to have to go back and just, you know, reconstruct it in a way that’s going to be useful for the people looking at it and not too wildly crazy for me to draw.
Description Narrator: The completed sketch of the plant is shown over the video.
Dick: Kathleen?
Kathleen: Yeah?
Dick: Look at this. The little holdfasts are almost kind of a gold color.
Description Narrator: Dick closely examines a tiny air plant on a tree.
Kathleen: Yeah…Yeah, but you don’t see those on the bigger ones.
Dick: No, on the bigger ones, just on the little ones, that’s because they are just getting attached.
Speaker 1: What are you guys looking at?
Kathleen: These are Tillandsias.
Dick: Little babies.
Kathleen: Little air plant. They’re called Few-leaved air plants.
Dick: When they get big, they get completely underneath the rough bark.
Kathleen: Alright, I am sketching now.
Dick: Okay. Sketch away!
Kathleen: The story is that my mother always told me that I couldn’t draw a straight line.
Description Narrator: Kathleen and Dick are back in the living room of their trailer.
Kathleen: I took a watercolor, botanical watercolor class at Fairchild, and I liked it. You get a good teacher like I have, and that teacher will say, “No, you don’t draw the plant as you see it. You draw it as you want others to perceive it.”
Description Narrator: Back in the habitat, Kathleen takes photos with a small digital camera.
Kathleen: So, after I make those sketches then I’ll photograph the plant. And I'll photograph it intensively because a lot of times when I reconstruct the plant, I will do it from the photographs. So, after the photographs and the sketching, then we take everything back and I assemble all this, and I begin the composition process. And then I sit down, and I do the botanical, actual watercolors.
Description Narrator: Dick and Kathleen examine a Gold Foot Fern growing from a tree. The scene fades to Kathleen’s ink drawing of the fern.
Kathleen: No spores yet, there should be.
Dick: I think they might have a fruiting body I don't know.
Kathleen: I think a spore is starting. They’re really cool...
Dick: But look at that new fern coming out there.
Look at this fig growing out of here. Isn't that wild! Look, it is going to strangle this... Geesh!
Description Narrator: They continue to wade through the water with walking sticks.
Text: Kathleen is creating botanical illustrations for trail guides and signs in Everglades National Park.
Dick: Here’s another Gold foot, they’re everywhere! You know, I never noticed them so much before.
Kathleen: Something about the Everglades called to our hearts. Every year that we come back, we find out something new, and we just keep learning. So, I think that’s why it is, it’s so complex, there are so many levels. And, of course, now with me being able to do art... That’s a whole other level that has been really wonderful.
Description Narrator: A purple flower with yellow stamens sprouts from the red bracts of a Tillandsia. A Red-bellied woodpecker eats from the flowering part and flies away.
Text: One month later…
Branches are baren and the Cypress Dome is dry. The Cowhorn Orchid is without color and wilted.
Text: Cowhorn Orchid (dormant). Peak dry season.
Dick: We came here at the end of November, and next year we’ll be here at the beginning of November.
Kathleen: Because I’ve got an art show in the Coe Visitor Center.
Description Narrator: Dick and Kathleen pose outside of their trailer in the park housing community. The frame transitions, showing vacant trailer pads.
Text: Kathleen’s botanical art show was on display at the Ernest Coe Visitor Center during November 2009. With samples of Kathleen’s ink illustrations.
A real Cowhorn orchid is compared to Kathleen’s completed, watercolor illustration.
U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service.
Everglades National Park. National Park logo.
Everglades National Park video.
Featuring: Dr. Kathleen Konicek-Moran, Dr. Dick Konicek-Moran, http://konicek-moran.com/
Producer, Director, Editor: Jennifer Brown.
Executive Producers: Allyson Gantt, Greg Litten, Alan Scott.
Technical Support: Andrew Pringle.
Music performed by: Clay Carrington, ‘Acoustic Guitar Melodies’, and Jami Sieber, ‘Invisible Wings’ from the Lush Mechanique album, Magnatunes Records, www.magnatunes.com.
Description
Video about volunteers and botanical illustration in a cypress dome (7 min. with closed-captions).
Duration
7 minutes, 28 seconds
Credit
NPS video by Jennifer Brown
Date Created
10/27/2009
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