Green Gulch Seed Catalogue - Golden Beet (44/50)

A composition from Oda's Green Gulch Seed Catalogue series — a project connected with Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California, the organic farm affiliated with San Francisco Zen Center where Oda has been closely associated. The golden beet as a subject brings Oda's goddess iconography into direct contact with the living world of seeds, growth, and harvest: the beet's extraordinary golden flesh, its roundness and rootedness in the dark earth, its nutritional richness. A seed catalogue is an act of hope — the potential of the living plant preserved in the tiny package of the seed — and Oda's artistic engagement with this theme connects her ecological and spiritual concerns with the Zen Buddhist tradition's emphasis on mindful engagement with the physical world.