Hemlock Hospice is an elegy for the dying New England hemlock forest #ArtTuesday
Beautiful installation from David Buckley Borden and team featured in The Boston Globe.
You’re walking along in the vast Harvard Forest in Petersham, the air sharp and redolent of fallen leaves, when suddenly you reach a brightly painted wooden barrier. “Trail closed,” it reads. “Safety hazard.” It’s the first stop of the Hemlock Hospice, an art installation and interpretive trail by designer David Buckley Borden and his team of forest ecologists. As its name suggests, the mile-long project is an elegy for the New England hemlock forest, which is dying. “People who walk these trails expect a certain experience and then they run into this,” said Borden. “It’s meant to jar them, to say, ‘You have to think about your woods in a whole new way.’ ”
Part sculpture, part pedagogy, part citizen science, the project speaks largely in artistic metaphor. But the popular Black Gum trail really is off-limits to the public, because its towering eastern hemlock trees have been infected by the invasive woolly adelgid . These tiny beetles suck all the nutrients out of the hemlock’s needles and leave ghost trees, bare and vulnerable to toppling over in the wind. Another stop along the hospice trail offers visitors a row of brightly decorated hard hats.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: The latest on Raspberry Pi RP2350-E9, Bluetooth 6, 4,000 Stars and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey