Salixology (WILLOWS & SCULPTURE) with Patrick Dougherty

0:00Oh, hey, it's your new phone case. You're not quite used to alleyward. And this is a big one for us. It's a big one for me. It's our 531st episode. But more importantly, this week marks the 9th anniversary since Alligy's first episode came out. So we like to look up those anniversary guides and I was thrilled to discover that the customary 9th anniversary gift is Willow. I was like, what? I love Willow. I grew up around it. We had a creek in my backyard right outside the gate in a pasture. One of my favorite artists makes these Willow sculptures. If you listen to the field trip episode at the Natural History Museum of LA County, I did years back. I talk about this Willow structure built in the gardens that so buoyed my spirits during a really dark time that I named my production company after it, Willow Hut. That structure was built by an LA artist by the name of David Lovejoy, who had assisted this one internationally acclaimed Willow sculpture, Piany, or whose work I've

1:00been obsessed with for the past like 15 years. Huge, tangled, but somehow orderly, these sweeping castles made out of sticks. They look like tumbling forms that seem to spill out of buildings. Just a feeling of like, wait, how is this giant thing I'm looking at made entirely of sticks? It's like a fever dream, like an accidental mushroom snack that made the winds conspire to build you a haven. Anyway, that artist that I've been obsessed with is this week's guest. So this is not a topic you ever anticipated. I'm sure you might be like, huh, it's one that is so close to my heart. I don't even care if you care about it, but you will deeply in less than an hour. So I emailed this guest at a nowhere. And I said, I'm a huge fan. I would be willing to cross the country for a chance to sit down and ask about your work. And a few weeks later, I found myself on these shady roads under the canopies of North Carolina outside of Chapel Hill about to turn onto this long gravel road

2:05that leads to a stone house they share with their wife Linda. So I'm looking for a willow. I'm looking for some sort of stick gate. According to Google Maps, I think I'm getting close. No, okay. It is very woodsy here. Oh, here we go. Of course, the gates are made out of sticks. And then I saw him full head of white hair wearing a tiny denim shirt and some smart jeans. Just ambling casually out of the gate. And we'll hear more about their work. What a willow is in the history and the folklore behind these weedy trees. But first a huge thank you to patrons of the show who support a patreon.com slash allergies and submit questions ahead of time. Thank you to everyone who is out there in Allergies Merch from Allergies Merch.com. Thank you to all the folks who leave reviews for the show,

3:10which has literally kept us in your ears the last nine years. I read all of them. So thank you, Janet Delewell, who left a review today saying that Allergies was named in their master's thesis for keeping them focused during very rough lab work. And so I'm very honored to be cozy in the pages of your thesis, congrats on the masters. Also timely given me naming my company after this guests work. So the only bigger honor is if someone found like a parasite and called it Allergiesium or something, but one can dream. Also thank you to sponsors of Allergies who make it possible to donate to a cause of this guest choosing. Picture this. Years of guaranteed research support and a vibrant scientific community that has your back. If you are a PhD student postdoc or early career faculty in the biological or biomedical sciences, that doesn't have to be a fantasy. HHMI has a program for you. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute supports scientists at every career stage with

4:14a people not projects approach long term support and the resources for breakthrough science. Applications open now. You can find your program at hhmi.org slash Allergies. Today's show sponsored by Strawberry.me. Are you where you want to be in your career? Are really any of us super successful people have mentors? They have coaches. They have people guiding them every step of the way. That's where Strawberry.me career coaching comes in. It gives you the clarity, strategy, also accountability needed to turn your ideas and your goals into reality. Whether you're learning a new job, maybe you're trying to advance in the job you've got or you just want to leave your field and go into one that you love more. Career coaching gives you expert guidance. You'll identify obstacles holding you back. You can develop a step-by-step plan. It's really hard to know when the right time to act on things are. When you need more planning, when to just go for it, a professional coaching helps you take control of your career trajectory. I have had career coaching. Wouldn't have started Allergies without it. And also at viewsdrawberry.me to help me figure out

5:16how to make sure that I'm using my voice the most authentic way that I can. My coach was very empathetic but also was straight talking to help me identify where I can take action. Go to strawberry.me slash Allergies and get 50% off your first coaching session. That's strawberry.me slash Allergies. It's like therapy for your career. Okay, let's get into it. So, Salix is Latin for willow tree. Just straight up. And there are somewhere between 330 and 500 plus species of willow in the world. Likewise, fun number coincidence. Thisologist has completed 330 sculptures out of willow as well as other woods. So, we're going to chat about species, bendiness, site-specific art installations, folklore, plumbing, weeping over willows, aspirin gloves, caskets, willow remediation to the rescue and why spending hours a day outside can change your life with environmental sculptor, willow handler, artistic, legend, hero of mind, an honorary salixologist, Patrick Doherty. He-him.

6:39Patrick Doherty. Great. I'm a sapling sculptor. And, you know, I have loved your work for so many years. It's so stunning for anyone who hasn't seen it. It almost looks like these wind swept stick sculptures that are huge, very much larger than life. They have a certain kinetic sense to them. They have a lot of movement and it, it seems impossible that a person can make them. We try to make something that looks really natural. Doesn't look man-made. Yeah. And one of the things by using a kind of a drawing style can get a sense of animation in the surface. For example, if you hit a piece of paper with one weight, an pencil with one weight, and you finish off with another, you have tapered lines, since sticks are tapered. If you organize them in one direction, it implies a kind of sense of animation or movement. And so it's a way of building an illusion like you would with the drawing. And does that mean that a lot of the weight, the thicker end of the stick tends to be at the

7:44bottom and then it whips up? It can be. Basically, the style of making is to start, well, of course, with a plan and what you're trying to do and leave enough room within the plan so that you can add live as you go. But structural work is always first. And in a lot of cases, that means digging holes in the ground and sticking bigger sticks, basically small trees in there, setting a scaffolding around that and then bending these uprights into the shape that you're proposing. And then once you finish your kind of structural phase, you start on the aesthetics of it. Oh, got it. Yeah. And then the finally is the cosmetics where, like in a drawing, you would erase. Yeah. So you can go back and put little sticks over things you don't like to give it a more of a sense of motion. So my job is to build an illusion, one that causes people to come running. And so part of that is this serendipitous nature of not planning so strongly or fully,

8:47but discovery as you move along. I'm wondering a little bit about the materials you use, because I know that it varies based on what location you're at. I've read that red maple's your favorite. Yeah. But then out in the west, you, there's a lot of willow. Of use, a lot of willow. Can you kind of run me through some of the saplings that you work with? And where do you get them? Well, if the organization we're working for has enough money and they don't have the energy to find material, we might order material. And we've ordered it from Fredonia, New York. There's a double A willows. And then we've ordered from Canada, Montreal. We had a source. And outside of San Francisco. But generally, we'll find a way together and say in France, we might have found a sewage treatment plant that has planted willow out in and around it so that they dump the excess water in there and take off the water. You know, everywhere that you can possibly think of around lakes, along rivers, we'll just find a good place to discover where we

9:50can get some material. Have to ask permission. And a lot of times the forestry service and lots of other people have helped us find material. And we'll use maples and sweet gums and just a myriad of other plants that are flexible. They need to be flexible and they need to have a certain beauty to them. And a lot of times the material that you would think of, oh, what we have plenty of autumn olive or we have plenty of those are materials that are not that usable, even though they might be a pest. Oh yeah. What are they less flexible? Sometimes it's flexibility and sometimes they have little thorns on them or some other thing. They're just not a beautiful stick. So oftentimes the ones that people would prefer that we use and say, oh, we have a ton of that. So, well, you know, that's not the best one. Not for, you know, actually weaving. Yeah. So and then in California, you've got a lot of willow in Montana, got willow. You've got other

10:51things, fire cherry, some other things that are mound plants that you can use and how to then Hawaii. You might use strawberry guava, a Java plum. Oftentimes they are trees that grow fast like maples that people would prefer not to have that many. And so yes, there are hundreds of species of willows and they tend to love water. They thrive at the banks of rivers and streams and wetlands. And the most common species you might see is Salix alba, which is the white willow, which grows fast and grows big. Sometimes eight stories tall. But then again, there are many willow and while most are native to the northern hemisphere, there are a few in this other in hemisphere. But this one 1987 paper in the Journal of Systematics and Distribution titled on the distribution and origin of Salix in the world says in a very like sweetly down home kind of tone, it says such two and fro willow migration between Asia and Europe

11:53and between North America occurred so often that it resulted in the diversity of willow species in Asia. So a lot of two and fro willow migration. Some of it good, some of it bad. There was a 2009 paper in ecological engineering titled the characterization of willow varieties for use in ecological engineering applications, coordination of structure, function and auticology. And it stumped me with auticology. I'd never seen that. But apparently, auticology is the study of the adaptedness of individual organisms. So think ecology and a ut like auto, something on its own, auticology. But there's the white willow, there's the weeping willow, there's a shining willow, a black willow, coyote willow. Of course, there's pussy willow, also called the goat willow, which can live up to 300 years. And there's this 2017 Brooklyn Botanical Garden article titled aptly, what are pussy willows? Anyway, I like that it has a

12:54little bit of an attitude. And it explains that those little bunny tail shaped soft velvety growths on the branches of pussy willows are actually flowers just before they fully bloom. So that soft coating of hairs acts as insulation to protect these early flowers from the cold. So that is a little background on willow. But again, there are so many species and that's not the only type of wood that Patrick thoughtfully sources to sculpt into these stunning nest-like forms. So like in the southern pine forest, they're often going in and cutting out underneath the forest and taking all these trees down for thus competition. Duke University, Duke Forest have been very kind to us. As they're in their forestry operations, they're often clearing under pine trees that they want to have the best chance of making a hundred-year-old board, you know. And the same thing,

13:54some place like Clemson in South Carolina, they have huge forestry projects. So we were able to gather in their forest. I understand too that when there's development and they're kind of clearing out land to build something and then they'll go do something for a few weeks in the meanwhile sapling start to come back up. So initially when I started sculpture and started building on site, I would take materials from farmland or excess places in North Carolina and drive it up and down the eastern seaboard and make work in Florida, work in Maine, work everywhere. They're not discovered that they're in fact were saplings ready to go in all states and even in all foreign countries too because urbanization means that the belt lines of every city provides plenty of materials. So a belt line is just what it sounds like. It's the border around an urban expansion where developments are moving out from the city center kind of turning into more housing and commerce,

14:56less nature, but life finds a way and Patrick finds saplings because... For us to cut down and then like weed trees come up and and they're kind of ladies in waiting because eventually the bulldozers arrive and they're making housing projects and all kinds of business opportunities. So if you catch this melee it is exactly the right time. We've been accused of stopping along the interstate screaming at someone, no don't cut it, we'll come there and then that might be a hundred miles to get back to talk to landowner because we see the perfect thing. The other thing is people often giving you permission and they don't own the land so if you don't hit the right person or it might be a family and the daughter got permission for you and the son said my daddy never told you you could get it so you know you can get it in a family warfare if you're not careful. I feel like a part of your job has to be being good at interfacing with other people because

16:00you are gathering and then also when you're making these site specific sculptures you've got a lot of look he lose and probably a lot of people saying like what are you doing? That's right probably the best part of my job was the fact that I built all my work on site and I was willing we had no barriers to keep people from walking up because it's relatively innocuous work we're not slinging big timbers around. I'm sure you've made a lot of fans along the way just as they're watching how these things are coming together over what a period of almost three weeks right? That's right a three week work period is a pretty good period because if you work longer than that your sites are getting very tired because we you know have a cooperative thing people the people that we're working for our sponsors are also we're using their goodwill and their leverage in the community to get things set up for us a site maybe finding materials, getting some scaffolding over there and so forth.

17:01And once they get something there that people become very interested in it becomes a much more public work. Right and Patrick alongside countless volunteers and in the last decade his full-time construction assistant Sam who is also a talented ceramicist and his son has completed over 300 of these huge sculptures in a ton of states and countries from Scotland to Japan with another upcoming Japan construction for the International Horticultural Expo outside of Tokyo next March. So this man was born booked and busy and I understand that even as a youth you were an outside kid right you were out kind of playing with sticks and playing in the forest. Can you tell me a little bit about maybe how nostalgia played into where your path as an artist kind of to you? Well I think kids know everything about sticks it's a weapon a tool a piece of a wall they're used in and so much of kid play basically because it's an available you see a child will pick up a stick

18:06and drag it down the street and it's my contention now that we kind of replay some of our hunting and gathering paths that deep within us in our subconscious we have an innate knowledge of how to work with this material because it's been so sentinel to dwellings basketry all kinds of other ways that we've employed sticks when we really have steel and glass and other things and so kids kind of replay that initiative and so like I must have capitalized that a little bit in my childhood and then somehow seen saplings as a kind of an initial place to start making artwork that's why birds and gorillas and all these other animals and so forth insects and they they are just taking the same sticks at a more micro level and figuring out what to do with them oftentimes you think of craftsmanship but when you see a bower bird work you realize that craftsmanship is really in some ways just a repetitive act if you repeat something in a pretty much the same way each time again

19:13and again it starts looking like it has meaning and importance and an atability is being played out somehow because this thing looks so even and so beautiful now I would say that birds nest in some ways a wealth of knowledge about how to hold things together yeah one of the things I try to do is to not use any fasteners and so forth because I wanted to look more thorough and part of the naturalness of the thing is that somehow it just seems to be there and that's the way you feel about bird nest too and a minimum of movement you know like moving it back and forth locking it in which reminds me that nidology is the study of birds nests and yes there is a museum dedicated to thisology it's only like an hour and a half away from me I don't know why I haven't been stay tuned I got to take a journey there but if you're feeling inspired to bend twigs who among us is not let's get to some physics of the tension of tangled things so there was a 2023 paper in

20:17the journal science titled ultra fast reversible self assembly of living tangled matter and it blasts out of the gate in the intro was something so relatable it sounds like a Tuesday night open mic saying anyone has ever packed away a rope without coiling it properly knows how easily it gets tangled at how difficult it can be to untangle and it says by contrast California black worms will migrate into a tangled ball over the course of minutes to regulate temperature or moisture but then disentangle and scatter within milliseconds upon sensing danger I'm sorry a worm ball yes tangled active filaments are ubiquitous in nature it says from chromosomal DNA to root networks and yeah worm collectives and this paper found that alternating helical waves like spiral waves makes it easy to tangle and then rapidly untangle if you're in a worm ball and are a worm and you

21:18need to get out of dodge so this is a form of topology which is anotherology I've not covered and that is the math of spaces especially weird spaces and there was a 2025 Harvard article titled how birds nest together researchers unravel entanglement between stiff straight rods and it celebrates the paper entanglement transition in random rodpackings this all explains that researchers collabed with the Harvard Museum of comparative zoology which lent them a real birds nest that had been made with steel wires by a bird and a neither really desperate or just an insufferable steam punk bird but as the paper asked are we humans smart enough to decipher how they do so time will tell so the humans standing over this birds nest first deployed x-ray computerized tomography so they put it in the CT scanner to unveil the structure right and the geometrical and topological complexity

22:21of this birds nest that a bird made with these steel wires so what were their findings so they said that increasing the aspect ratio of rods leads to a proliferation of regions of strong entanglement what does that mean it means the skinnier longer sticks tangle more easily than the short fountains I mean yeah yeah at least one of you is listening to this well I don't know chewing on a tree and building a dam or maybe you're trying to untangle a thin just hopelessly nodded necklace being like no shit Sherlock I'm in it right now but this is how Patrick can make 50 foot sculptures out of long skinny sticks topology baby like you get a matrix and then you start pulling sticks through that matrix in specific ways and you're constantly as you're working you're looking you're saying to yourself better or worse how could I use these lines to improve the reaction that the public

23:27is making it looks more natural it looks like it moves more freely you know it apes the idea that you could go in and hide somewhere yeah you don't want to trap your viewer but you want them to feel comfortable and surrounded in a kind of sense of maybe what a bird feels when it's nestled down and so I think there's a little bit of garden of Eden desire in everybody to go across a forest curtain and kind of live and breathe with the other animals yeah and so you know when you make things out of sticks and they call to you it's in a way it's called to some of your deeper subconscious feelings and often you know people will tell you about trees they've known when they were small simple hard and easy big mister twister because you're a kind of a sitting duck while you're working if people have a motive moments oftentimes you're the recipient you know I'll say I had my first

24:28kiss under the lilac bush I you know I I'd have divorced my husband or wife and then I took a walk in the woods and that and I saw the light at the end of the tunnel you know I saw the the light coming through a shaft of light hitting a path you know there's a lot of poetics that are connected with our impressions of where we've been when sticks and nature surrounded us you know I've ever heard of high coup yeah there's a lot of poetry out there that's just a song to the trees there's this one high coup I recently read that was by an early 1700s poet Chiyoujo or lady Chiyou a famous and well respected poet in a time when female poets were not respected and she married a servant she had a son the son died as a baby and then her husband died less than two years later she never remarried

25:28she lived another 50 years and there's this one poem translated by Daniel Buchanan and it reads bearing no flowers I am free to toss madly like the willow tree so if you were child-free like me your dad just think of it as an excuse to toss madly so what yeah like your job as an onsite artist and as an artist in general you're like a bartender where you are a craftsman at a certain thing which is these these things you make and then you're having this real-time reaction that's and sometimes those things get played back into the work I mean I always feel like the work is is a collection of stories in a way you've embedded something a premonition almost out of your subconscious and then somehow there's uptake with it and it's furthered because people tell you stories about their own particularity you know yeah and the nests they have outside their window or the beavers damn they saw or something they saw when they visited an indigenous tribe somewhere and because a lot of the

26:36world still has nothing to work with yeah so they they're picking up saplings and things that grow back so if you went into the woods and cut a lot of little trees down little saplings you know the next year they would be sprouted right back just decide note beavers get it they get it they chomp down on some willow they move into the dam the willow sticks are like hell yeah and then the ecosystem is clotted up more to make their little ponds and fish thrive hiding in the roots so do the bugs and it all works out and just a heads up we do have a castorology episode about beavers we have an indigenous fashionology and a conestromology episode on basket weaving methods and plant material also of course a two-part tendrology episode about trees we'll link all of those in the show notes and if you're like what's wicker is it willow yeah it can be wicker comes from the root for willow but it's come to mean anything like woven basket like with plant or even synthetic

27:40cordage or flexible rods retain now is made of woven palm specifically so newsflash we use plants for a lot of things willow has even been cultivated as a more renewable resource for energy needs as it can be burned for electricity and then it also captures carbon as it regrows and according to this 2005 paper genetic improvement of shrub willow crops for bioenergy and environmental applications in the United States when 10 to 15 percent of coal is replaced with willow biomass for burning sulfur and nitrogen emissions are reduced in since the carbon that's emitted through burning the willow biomass for energy was initially captured from the atmosphere during the growth of the willow there's no increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide when power is produced from willow biomass so cultivating all this willow for different industries was actually news to me I was I did not know

28:43that so that's the way that willow farms work you know is that they using the same root stock all the time and they're cutting it off and they sell it or use it for power plants or cut it and make riparian things for streams and and so forth but it's a constant product that could come from cutting and letting it grow back and cutting it again maybe that's one reason why saplings are such a comfort to look at there it almost implies water and nutrients you know that if if a sapling is sprouting that you're probably safe as well yeah well that's true and there's a a freshness of when you see the first shoot coming out of the ground and so a lot of that gets played out in these sculptures when you're inside to be able to see out through windows and maybe view the world a little bit differently through a kind of a natural opening or door or something and have secret twists and turns so that you feel like there's a level of exploration as you're

29:46taking this this journey yeah you're kind of forgiving the reality of what surrounds you and entering a kind of fantasy world in some way that's how I felt when I went into there was a willow house a willow hut at the LA Natural History Museum that was built by Dave Lovejoy. Oh yeah my friend Dave. Yeah they called it a willow house I always call it a willow hut when you step inside it it was you know maybe the size of a small bus yeah a little shuttle bus maybe standing up but you instantly feel safe and more connected to nature and yet the the way that shafts of light will come through the branches it's really otherworldly and at the same time it feels very essential to what it is to be an animal on the planet. I think that's really true yeah the material itself conveys so much. And Patrick told me that placement of a sculpture is key so if you isolate it too far from where people naturally walk it's a little intimidating to approach

30:50so he places them about a literal stones throw away from where people are already walking. You have to lead them there say it's okay to step off the sidewalk which I think again is what artists do is tell people it's okay to step off the sidewalk you have to lead them there. Yeah and find a new place. When you realize that being an artist was something that was going to be inevitable for you as someone who is a maker really young when you were deciding kind of what media you were going to work with where was that click where you were like sticks living living. I think you'd stumble into it in a way. Yeah you know there's so many saplings in North Carolina along the roadways they tend to spray now but when I first started there was just a world of saplings everywhere that maintenance people were constantly striving to keep down. So it's not unusual that a sculptor would see the potential of saplings along his own driveway. Plentiful, renewable and that you could continue to use them. Yeah you know it was a

31:53world of plenty and then the knowing that it had such a respected history and indigenous tribes and animal life and children's play gave you inference to you know that how could you use it in a way to be suggestive and provocative and cause people to want to come look at it you know and talk to you about it and tell the you the stories that they know from their own life. Yeah and Patrick says that power plants and real estate development and utility companies tend to play nice if he requests material from them as it's kind of a benefit to the community and he likens it to borrowing a cup of sugar from a neighbor and then being credited when people like the cake. So utility companies also do have to clear branches and understory around power lines to mitigate fire risk and so if he's there to catch it and haul it away to make a sculpture all the better. So power plants indeed. Plus we use volunteers. Yeah. And so we'll use community members to help us.

32:57You can get an ad in the newspaper telling people to come down but it's better to have people invite their friends. Ah of course. I worked on it you know come down here and take a look at it. Yeah I helped build when they replaced the willow hut at the natural hitch. Yeah I was there. I was there in a hat and gloves and it meant a lot to me to know that even you know a few sticks you know I was there for an afternoon just some of those sticks were I got to touch you know and when they took the original willow hut down they removed it the sculpture from the garden but they saved one twig of it for me. Oh yeah. They knew that it meant a lot to me and I actually named my company willow hut because I was in my accountant's office and I had to come up with a name and I thought oh yeah. What's a what's a place that makes me feel really happy. Yeah yeah. And so it's something that I remember and I carry with me. And thanks again to LA artist Dave Lovejoy and the natural history museum here in LA for making that sculpture. It's now gone. It was forever in my memory and you can look up the hashtag willow hut Wednesday to enjoy pictures

34:03from that era and when I went to volunteer my task was stripping the leaves off of these long bushy willow rods but I don't I don't even know if that's regional or customer or what all I know is that it smelled good I was in heaven and I always wonder like where do the leaves go and are you stripping the leaves as you go. Well a lot of times we we're gathering in the winter or on the shoulders of the season you know sometimes we we've worked in the summer and we have to take the leaves off sometimes we can be tricky if it's willow and lay it out on the ground and water it and a lot of times the leaves will turn yellow and they'll just fall off. As for seasons again willows tend to live in the northern hemisphere so in spring they usually bust out leaves and flowers first and their flowers are kind of these like football shaped little spiky kush balls and then as the days get shorter in autumn they lose their leaves but yeah sometimes

35:03Patrick and the crew kind of spritz them to encourage the leaves to just skid at all. We don't know how to do it but sometimes it works you know and now I understand too that it's easier to pull the blunt end yeah and then as it tapers it's easier to go right yeah we are always working with our volunteers and say like you start with the big end and pull it through yeah you know a lot of times I I don't give people a lot of advice at first I'll say well like why don't you try it a lot of times volunteers work on the interior of the pieces you can practice you know some people who work for us have a real gift and kind of a drawing style they can visualize that and they can add lib you know so most of the time Sam and I touch the he's my son and he's worked for me for a number of years we will go and touch every single bit of the surface and rectify any little difference because we wanted to look really a certain way you don't see it but subtly we all will lean things against

36:06each other so oftentimes in the biggest sense they're tripods or they're paired up there's some way that we're trying to make a piece sound enough that people can go in without the danger of of it collapsing on yeah but you know baskets are very strong and then these are huge kind of basket like shapes and so they have real integrity themselves where have you been like how many what's your passport like is it just so stuffed yeah well we've made about three hundred and thirty five big pieces yeah I'm kind of semi retired at the moment I used to travel for a 10 months a year each piece takes three weeks to make and so I'd be off a week and then we'd start again so for 40 years I was never home mm-hmm when I was 78 I felt like I needed to slow down because not because we can't work but because the planning for these pieces takes two years often and so when you're get older you're

37:12not sure you'll be around two years now everything is more tentative you know are you 78 I'm 81 now what yeah what first I thought you meant in 78 no I'm so you're 81 yeah no idea I guess that sticks have been good to me I mean do you think that staying outside and just get do you think it's staying outside but also this is this is like a athletic activity mm-hmm it doesn't seem like it because we make it look like a normal person could be there and do it yeah but doing it eight hours a day for three solid weeks and then a week off and eight hours a day for another three weeks you know you stay in relatively good shape yeah how many pounds do you think of sticks to you use for big sculptures we we probably use oh maybe three or four tons we generally order a tractor trailer loaded sticks we're gonna work in Japan in February at a horticultural expo it's in Yokohama so we're

38:12looking for saplings now and we're telling them well there's how many do you need we're gonna get willow from different farmers different plots and so we we need a tractor trailer load are you or Sam afraid of heights you can't be right no we're not afraid of heights but we generally work up to about 25 feet sometimes you can put a ladder on it and death defyingly get up higher than that if we have to we can go as many high as we need I've made some towers where we would be working at 40 feet at 50 feet what kind of equipment do you have to use like how many gloves how many do you have a favorite pair of of clippers well we use felt I'm more I showed you my Philco clippers yeah I use Philco number two it's the most universal Philco is a great there's some knock off subit that are pretty good but Philco is is the one that all the botanic gardens all the folks that you see with the little hoaster on uh-huh but they're vocal clippers in there that's that's what you need if you're gonna be a serious stick worker what about gloves gloves I've worn

39:18I don't have my glove collection here because it's in a traveling show but every time people work for me at the end of the installation we get everybody to sign the gloves including the mayor whoever's there and then we put them on the wall and so they're in now a traveling exhibition it's gonna be opening again in the Cameron museum down in Wilmington soon oh I love it and I've I maybe have 300 pairs of gloves and if you're anywhere near Wilmington North Carolina's Cameron Museum from November 2026 to April 2027 check out their exhibit it's called Patrick's pilgrimage and it does feature some sculptures indoors and also 250 gloves signed by his volunteers over the years and I saw some pictures and imagine browsing like an upscale boutique of gloves but they are all like well worn and misshapen it's so lovely what kind do you use are they leather you know you're kind of always have to go with what's local uh-huh so sometimes those local ones wear

40:24out sometimes they're the best ones you've ever put on your your hands you know the blue mules from Montana you know also you know we work in freezing rain we go somewhere and we work for three weeks it doesn't matter whether the downpour or you know we worked in Dallas for worth and during few years ago when they had this incredible cold freeze and it dropped to zero I remember we were working that day when it was zero degrees and freezing rain and so you know gloves are a big part of being able to persist so you know we had insulated gloves and everything else you could think of on our bodies oh my god so yeah gloves are a big part of it yeah I've gone through a lot of different brands of gloves have you ever found any weird bugs or animals well a lot of times if you're working in a museum you know they're really afraid because we worked at the Phillips collection in Washington DC I mean they've got these old masters photos I mean you can't get bugs in those frames so you

41:28know sometimes you have to treat the sticks maybe with a gas and earth gas being careful about selecting sticks so usually there are no bugs in the green saplings but say if they're connected to a stump and you cut it you might cut a bad piece off that would have a powder post beetle in it so being very careful about what you do still in all there couldn't crickets and stuff like that so you have to de-pest those they they cannot go inside yeah working outside it's fine do you ever get ticks well this is the gathering saga yeah of ticks bees snakes alligators you know if you're gathering down in South Carolina in the swamp you better be in the winter oh or else there's the the gators so forth and then it's kind of disconcerting when the neighbors stop until you don't go in there there's too many moccasins there oh and you think well that's the only place we can get these sticks we're gonna have to go in there you know what do you do do you just wear big shoes

42:29you beat a nice path into it and then be very careful about where you put your hands you know and if you do see a rattlesnake or something then you know people everybody jumps on the truck and it's you and somebody else out there cutting you know yeah hoping not to die during this installation you know I do I you know reading your book I've read of snakes maybe falling from the top a snake in the bathroom and then it's interesting that you have a friendly snake yeah we have a pet snake I've tried to show you but it's on a holiday right this way it lives under a lap that I kept my pool filter under there and so it sits on this little pan under there and it's a very very nice snake very sweet snake can I ask you a couple questions from listeners sure okay great and if you need any visual aids for this episode feel free to check out Patrick's Instagram at Patrick Dirty sculpture which we'll link right in the show notes and while Sam his son assists and co-builds his sculptures his daughter Eileen has been on hand to help out with Patrick's growing Instagram

43:32audience he told me right through this chuckle that he's made sculptures all of his life but what went viral the past few weeks is a video of him showing off a big sweet non-venomous snake that lives in his fish pond and he says on the post I'm very fond of her and I'm always careful not to startle her so tell him you love his work at Patrick Dirty sculptor on Instagram and each episode we donate to a cause of theologist choosing in this week Patrick would love for it to go to the NC conservation network which is a statewide network of over 60 community and environmental justice organizations focused on protecting North Carolina's environment and public health and creating a North Carolina committed to improving and protecting the state's vast natural resources and will link the North Carolina conservation network right in our show notes too thank you to sponsors of allergies for making these donations possible every week this podcast is brought to you by Squarespace if you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years it's an all-in-one website platform

44:33whether you're trying to grow a business you have or if you're just a baby business getting started it has everything you need that's where I secured my domain name and helped me build a professional site I can update it so easily I've been using Squarespace since before allergies existed after procrastinating for years I literally built my website in one evening they have templates they have flexible editing tools Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work you can book clients you can get paid they have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing an email all in one place whenever someone I know needs a website whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up or someone who's just starting a business I'm like dude Squarespace so head to squarespace.com slash allergies for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use offer code allergies to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain you can do it this episode of allergies with alley ward is brought to you by alloy health menopause it's inevitable it's also treatable this is

45:34where allo comes in you're like what is this it's a digital health platform right it connects you with a menopause specialized doctor they exist they're available everything is done online no waiting for an appointment you don't have to wait in line with the pharmacy if you listen to my field trip mystery surgery episode or any of the three menopause episodes we've done I've talked about how I went through menopause really early and I've had to deal with hormone therapy luckily I've had it for many many years and it was hard to get it was hard to get doctors who understood so head to my alloy.com and use the code allergies and tell them all about your symptoms you'll get a fully customized treatment plan and unlimited messaging with your doctor plus you'll get 20% off your first order today so head to m y a l l o y.com my alloy.com and use the code allergies to get 20% off your first order and this code is valid on products only total lifesavers.

46:36does your closet need a fall reset? stitch fix is the secret for refreshing your wardrobe and feeling told in confident and how you dress their expert human stylists get to know your life your style and budget so they can pick pieces that actually work for you unlike other services there's no subscription required so you can order whenever you want without a huge commitment plus you get free shipping and returns get started today at stitchfix.com that's stitchfix.com listen sometimes you get out of your routine that happened to me recently when I went out of town and I realized I forgot my ritual essential for women 18 plus it's a multi that I've been taking for years and guess who landed in another country without a me didn't feel right they contain nine key nutrients two delayed release capsules designed for optimal absorption but ritual why do I love them so much they have a team of scientists they poured over thousands of studies to figure out what are common gaps that people need in their diet but they don't actually consume it's also

47:39designed to be gentle on the stomach you can take it with or without food which I love plus I like that it looks like a tiny lava lamp I tell you that every time but it has just beads and oil and it tastes like mint easy down the hatch I usually take them in the morning and the reason why I've stepped with ritual for so many years is because my schedule is all over the place sometimes I meet in breakfast sometimes I'm running through an airport with one shoe so instead of striving for perfect health aim for supporting foundational health save 25% on your first month at ritual.com slash allergies that's ritual.com slash allergies for 25% off your first month with the discovered cashback card it's payback time when you earn cashback on everyday purchases activate and earn 5% cashback at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases that's 5% cashback at different places each quarter like grocery stores on gas and at restaurants it pays to discover terms apply see discover dot com slash five for details all right let's stick to the mission here and

48:44let's get to your questions patrons we had a couple of questions that I thought were so sweet Claire bearer wanted to ask for Dean if you have any theories of why willow trees are so bouncy when you're trying to bend them do you find that certain sticks have more bounce more flex that's absolutely right so when we go out looking for sticks and the woods will flex a stick and to see how much flexing it has in it some sticks dry really quickly like an ash stick is already kind of dry they don't flex so well so a lot of times flexing is our game with various sticks and sometimes we need the side limbs on because they're what catches other limbs so if you drag a stick through the the woods you see what I mean to every everything catches on it yeah that's basically that infuriating tendency to tangle with other things is what we're using to hold things together so we like a lot of side limbs that helps entangle one thing to another so yeah flexibly not all

49:46willows are flexible some are very inflexible and some willows the side limbs drop off if you touch them oh so our special need is to have flexible sticks with lots of side limbs to stay on so we're looking for bouncy sticks all the time bounce you're the better cat Paul and azia hall both wanted to know cat says seeing as how willows can be brittle and don't live very long compared to other trees why do you think they were chosen for anniversaries they intertwine easily they're they're an easy stick the bark is slick so the bark slides beside another one easy enough they're not sharp in any way there's a kind of a very nice end to them they're usually a little bit weak on the end so they're not pokey as pokey so willow I'm sure everyone if they have it would choose that as a stick they're probably going to oh well if I have a big bunch of will I'm going to go use that and I looked this up willow was chosen as a ninth anniversary gift because it symbolizes the flexibility

50:51that marriage requires I guess bloom wherever the swamp takes your stumps and just bend in the breezes and the floods for more on strength and flexibility too you can listen to our osteology episode about bones strong with flexible gets a job done people wait why are willows so bendy though well according to this one 2009 paper having a large number of these flexible shoots having a ton of them helps to dissipate the force of the water through streams and rivers and that intense root system also helps the willows stay stable in floods and winds so not unlike last minute tickets that you got for Cirque du Soleil in Vegas the bendier the better and the more the merrier are relas arena wanted to know is it true that they grow from even a small cutting well this person says I'm reading a historical book about a family that chooses the surname willow at some point which symbolically became important because they managed to survive through thick and thin and

51:51wars and peace and hiding I looked everywhere for this book until my fingertips were cracked and bleeding before I finally just messaged patron or relis arena to admit my defeat and a relis was like oh yeah don't worry it's in Lothian okay never would have guessed that so thankfully they were there to clarify that and it's a book called saveum and it's informally translated to for the fam or something like for our own and it's by villas vituals and they fled Germany and then South America during the Russian occupation and fitaels means yes willow and the book notes on page 10 that the willow is a vigorous tree it sprouts roots and shoots even from a hune fence post but you mentioned that willow farms they can just keep growing they grow from a stool what they call the stump and they cop us it they cut cut it down to the base and it every time it grows out again

52:51it you get twice as many willows because they make a lot more each time so some of these stumps are huge and then they produce hundreds of shoots they come off of the stumps but in order to plant a lot of times you just cut a little piece of willow that's six inches long if you stick it in the ground and keep it wet it will root really yeah and so it immediately starts rooting and like a lot of times they just go down the row and stick these sticks in and when they try to refurbish stream banks and so forth they simply take not a plant with a root on it but just a little piece of stick and stick it down and if there's enough moisture in the soil these things will start growing and just a side note that Medusa snake sprouting from a decapitated stump is called vegetative reproduction and it goes hard as hell and as far as those roots strong enough to withstand a water current they are still anifirus meaning that they can grow in a line like a spine

53:54and they sprout shoots upward as they continue outward and a few of you asked about phyto remediation I'm looking at you smiley Kylie brookitini mads jillandri a j and first i'm going to ask our alphabets soup who wrote please please please explain how willow trees are used in phyto remediation and according to that earlier 2009 paper in the journal environmental engineering shrub willows have been used for remediation because they can deal with flooding to help contain ground water runoff and pick up contaminants like extra nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer as well as heavy metals and then when it's cut and burned as biomass for power plants the metals are just left behind in the ash and those bonkers strong roots can also control erosion and the shrubs are essentially affordable housing for so many critters they can also act as snow fences so will reports come out later that transplanted willow is invading and taking over native flora probably I don't know

54:57all the better to harvest and build sculptures with right what if you want to grow a house in your yard and there's been some artists that have done some interesting work with living willow structures yes a thing that's predominantly in england and living willow fences and so forth and a lot of those are just started by sticking a stick down in the ground and then tending to it by making sure it has plenty of water a bunch of people actually wanted to know about that poison charios Miranda panda gardener gaby had hydro wanted to know has asked I've seen people use them to build fences by planting sticks and then just letting them grow together does that really work it seems like it would require a lot of maintenance but how would you even start to do that you have to sort of go in every week or so and nudge them so I attended a a situation in england in which a couple of artists had helped a school build a huge dome out of sticks they had a big circle

55:57marked it out on the ground and then went around and stuck to a little bit larger stick in the ground without any root on it and then they watered it and got it going and then the students would kind of weave it as it grew more until they had a pretty good dome and they did have to trim either the students went out and maintained it by taking the new limbs that came out and twisting them into the matrix so it became fuller over time so it it looked very good but you can do some very nice structures particularly for kids and outdoor patios and and a lot of botanic gardens have taken on making all kinds of passageways and labyrinths and so forth by taking and lining willow out and patterns and then having a grow and have people walk through it and you have to have pretty wet soil for that right either that are a good sprinkling system I mean yeah but if you lived in boggy area you could easily make something yeah unfortunately for it lost angeles not much water not

57:01going to happen actually LA has a variety of biomes so I shouldn't say that we have wetlands and swamps reparian ecology and in fact the very well-known central street of LA near Beverly Hills, La Sianna Ga means the swamp because it was one and then it was drained to build mansions and malls and plastic surgery offices and also my dentist but let's talk once again about having a pet willow eight ounce shrimp bin Jill Landry a mandragora wandering Wyatt Michelle Volk so many questions dad jokes crack me up and a zia hall who asked how far away from the home is safe we're building and I want to plan out a good spot to meditate beneath a weeping willow well okay let's talk about it remember how strong those roots are right remember how much they tend to love water so that is not a great combo and some plumbers and tree experts say at least 20 meters or 60 feet from the foundation

58:05of your house or any pipes so ask a plumber or just heed the caution of fellow patron Ted Vissian who shared that they can verify a someone who spent thousands on replacement sewer lines after a willow tree filled my house's original ones with roots you don't want to mess up your sewer lines people but hey willows they just want to leave their mark in the world okay speaking of a zia hall wanted to know if you have a stick tattoo I don't have a stick tattoo I don't have any but I've got plenty of I would say I've got a little little place on my forehead where a stick whackered me oh you're serious and sometimes when I say say will you sign your work I just bite it you just bite it I leave my teeth mark on the stick I say well now I've signed it have you heard of tattoos that are stick and poke that a stick and poke tattoo is instead of using a door gun it's just a needle and ink it's like kind of an old fashioned one so yeah well

59:10and you can stain yourself with with different kinds of bark too if you want to be barehanded and use it over a period of time you'll get a nice leathery color yeah well especially with walnut right yeah well that's true you can make your own to henna tattoos with walnut bark and most all most all barks have a stain to them don't do this because of germs okay also yeah black walnut juice can stain which would be amazing if it didn't also have phyto toxic compounds that can lead to a rash or allergic reaction so again just like get some henna I'm too tired for you to experiment on yourself and then sue me you know one of the things we didn't mention is that there's a smell to different trees and so sometimes with willow if you conglomerate it in a big sculptures it's sometimes it be initially it's kind of overwhelming but there there's a sense of enhancing the natural world by as you brush through something even if it gets dried out you're kind of reinvigorating

1:00:15the aroma so I think that part of the enhancement for people coming and participating walking through is that they have the aroma of the natural world something they recognize from a camping trip or just brushing through on a walk in the in the woods you know they've done studies that the smell of trees is very healthy for people mentally and physically I could believe that believe it October 2025 journal nature title psychological and physiological responses to smells from nature potential health benefits for urban dwellers the findings so 30 studies they went through them they showed that exposure to smells from nature emitted from real natural sources positively influences human psychological and physiological responses these include reducing stress levels inducing relaxation and enhancing positive emotions and effective states also if you're wondering what willow tastes like or at least white willow it might have a bitter flavor it contains salicin which then turns into salicidic acid in your tummy and that is what acetyl salicidic acid

1:01:21or aspirin is based on so yes human beings were chewing willow bark and making willot for thousands of years for pain relief and a fever-reducer before bear got their dirty little monsanto mits on it so listen to our forest ecology episode and look for some creepy crawlies and on all of these stories tell people to go huff some bark oh yeah well you know so much of our background is buried in our subconscious I mean thousands thousands of years are somehow part of that not accessible per say yeah but affecting yeah but we're critters just like the rest of it right yeah let's see uh arella zirina wanted to know well wonders what willows would be thinking about if we could hear their thoughts do you think sticks have a certain spirit to the do you ever get a vibe from a certain pile of sticks where you're like there's a friendly vibe or this one's sort of like a kind of cranky well we want to say we're using you well yeah and that you know that we haven't killed your

1:02:22stump you can make more next year there is a way that there's a renewal thing that's part of it you know and alongside volunteers Patrick has also paired up with indigenous community members for site-specific installations they've gone out and asked could we use willow uh would you allow us to use willow and so then sometimes the we were in northern elinora university and we were going to have to talk to the locote is there and they had a difficult time naming it they said we could use willow at the university there was a synergy there yeah if you use willow you're gonna have to let us name it and the problem was that they couldn't figure out exactly what dancing willow meant oh because they wanted to name it something about willow dancing does that mean that the willow is being blown in the wind and it's there by moving or is it animated in its own right yeah because of the of its own desire to be part of the sculpture

1:03:25yeah a more of a poetic basis for naming it and so somehow by talking to the many elders of the tribe they came up with a deep thought about how to name it and give it the sense that the willow itself wanted to participate oh i think that's so beautiful and then did it end up being called dancing willow oh and i might be wrong but i tried to translate this to Lakota which would be chan shasha wachipi and of course so many indigenous groups and people all over the world have their own stories about willow the osage nation has won about a young man seeking wisdom from a willow asking it for advice like a grandfather again in japanese culture a willow represents a woman many cultures use willows particularly the weeping species to symbolize grief and willow sticks have been woven into caskets for thousands of years becoming popular in medieval times you can also just buy one now for like a grand what else patrons geocapyr rob Wallace Nathan Brooklyn tree hugger

1:04:27poison cherry of the lary's emerman haley russah a zeal hall rowan tree and red headed scientist and hope jay wanted to know if willow trees are found in folklore and myths you know in all the stories of people passing by talking about twigs and sticks while you're working have you heard any folklore or myths that people have shared well if you go to a library say the the morten arboreum Chicago has a huge tree library um um thousands and thousands of books about trees that have been donated to them some of them really old and what they pointed out to me is there's a lot of folklore that imagines people being born from trees in other words we weren't created and uh by god somehow we were the product of tree birth something you know and so you can read a lot of fables in which people feel like they were issued by your mother a big sapling I mean you know yeah you're a little acorn

1:05:32yeah you know and that that's the basis of the human race but the inference from talking to folks that had a little ability and had read through a lot of this lore that you know there's a credible belief among a lot of people that you know we were tree based and the stories in folklore about willow trees are as numerous as the shoots that jut up from a riverbank being like hey I'm here and first time question asker Jennifer Zhang said willows are such beautiful trees my mom told me that there's folklore that willow trees catch the ghosts and the spirits dwell inside them is there such folklore can they still haunt you if the willow is no longer weeping they ask I cannot give you a good ghost forecast I can't tell you that but I can't tell you that folks think willows got their email rep just by being droopy in general or for how the leaves shed what looks like tear drops in the rain and patron rob h said I recently read buffalo bird woman's garden and buffalo bird

1:06:33women they say describes using willow sticks and bows for all kinds of traditional work why was the willow such an important plant to native people on the plains and from what I've read rob h buffalo bird woman was of the hidatsa nation and willow was so flexible and strong and abundant that it was used to weave lodges and all kind of material items and hidatsa actually means people of the willow and some tales say that that was because the creator wanted the hidatsa peoples to be as numerous as the willow shoots lining them as hurry river so what you're going to want to do perhaps is get a copy of willow by Allison sign published by reaction books which is 240 pages of willow folklore will link it on our website at alliwore.com slash allergies slash salixology but yes humans have been down with little safe spaces made from plants since well before we were humans and while there are plenty of hybrids of weeping willow the only true one is salix bevelonica and it's native to drier areas in eurasia and while most trees do reach upwards these willows have a distinctly

1:07:38kind of like posture they can grow 80 feet but they have the same lifespan as your cousin who vapes 40 75 years tops now some of the weeping willow silhouette is just straight aesthetics in breeding they look cool that way so people made more of them but a June 2024 paper in the journal plant pathology titled what makes a tree weep revealed that one of the key players in directing growth of the branches is the hormone oxen and whose uneven distribution causes the plant to change the direction of the growth or branching or bending with or against gravity so willow they're just like they're flooded with hormones weeping they scare off children because they're full of ghosts now hope that helps laner schuster check a chinese chicken cake clay truer Lynette de Villa Helen A Megan Ratcliffe Meg saluga eating dog hair for a living abbey l one i docked to post Dylan v indy my ski and my acaffron you said sacks speaking of weeping did you ever weep at the

1:08:39giving tree by oh yeah man that's a real weeper isn't that that's the way yeah that my kids and my the woman that who was my office manager for years she was its preschool teacher and she had the the giving tree and we've often talked about the giving tree in terms of real life situations and families you know oh i mean i what a parable of codependence yeah too and enabling but also it's beautiful that the work that you do is shoots that are renewed and making something out of out of an area that's been cut down already or that that's in the works to be cut down so if they're you know if they're going to put a shopping center there and you're able to use some of these things to reinvigorate people's idea about the natural world i thought it was really sweet that um that Ellie stodon just said that hiding out under a mini weeping willow in my garden as a kid was tippy top cozy secluded dren and i think it's funny that so many people

1:09:42are just feel very cozy about it but i wanted to ask you know last last listener question here via cure an age Lauren harder quill Sloan Aaron white all crafty folks if you have any tips for starting to craft with sticks or let's say that someone myself wanted to make a small structure any tips on how to get started well one thing is if you can just find some material and i think for most people the finding resource is a big thing so if you have a stream behind your house and nobody minds or if you are going to clear your woods out and you have a kind of an even bunch of sticks they just came from the same spot so they're all the same variety or they all grew in the same way so that they're all the same height you know given a good bunch of sticks then you want to just start messing with them a little bit you know and one thing you always remember is start with a structure

1:10:44some kind of structure you know maybe there's some trees around and you could start interweaving around trees or dig some holes in the ground and put some sticks down in there and start making a structural base but experimentation is the game and of course you know mimicking so you can look at your bird nest outside your house and I wonder how they do that and you're not going to learn unless you pick a stick up and try to see if you bend it what will happen oftentimes when we've worked with children I have been so impressed with watching them discover things that I didn't know like what so if you take a stick two sticks maybe and there are one of them is kind of small and you just twist your fingers together all of a sudden you see one stick kind of twisting around the other and then I say let me have that and they kind of pull it and it won't come apart you know once we were at the Los Angeles Botanic Garden we worked there and a group of American Indians

1:11:45they have a Madison Garden there and I was working near there so they came down and they decided to take some saplings and stick from the garden and they decided to make a bow and arrow a bow string that would never break and they all sent there the whole day and they did this with their fingers around these fibers and then at the end of the day they had a bow string that purportedly would never break oh that's gorgeous everything was made from a little small fibers that were conglomerated into a bigger more known object you know so I think that they know if people haven't gotten a little bit of the material world and tried to work with it you know I have had an enhanced life my life has come through being outdoors and using natural materials and trying to see how they worked and the fantasy that goes with that and also the problem solving of trying to present something

1:12:46in a space that seems so natural and using sticks in a way that that make you feel like that they're floating and that they are moving like water or that it couldn't possibly be that a person made this yeah it's incomprehensible when you look at it you think I'm so glad this exists but it looks as though it came from a illustrated kids book about where a mouse lives but that is huge and you know it's just letting sticks kind of exert themselves and present themselves in the natural way that they are yeah and being a kind of facilitator and trying to reach for some of the subconscious feelings that people have about the natural world and let those somehow play out into the surfaces of these pieces yeah so that people really do want to come running is there something that is a challenge every time or is it like losing your clippers and you don't know where you put them or is it jet lag like what's the hardest well I tell you lose your clippers you go out of your mind

1:13:49if they fall into the mix somewhere you need two pair and then yeah you can it's so disturbing you can't sleep you know I think that the best part of the job is the day that you arrive and you have your idea and you see the site and you've remembered how you felt about it when you first saw it and you know that that's the feeling that you want to get back to and you have this big pile of sticks over here there potential materials to do anything that you want with and then you enter the doll drums and that is that you were hard day after day it's really boring it's hot or it's cold and you just keep slugging away and you're tired and you're cranky and you have to be nice because you're on site and people are asking you a question all the time but the next best moment is when you're finished and you know and you've brought it up to a point where you think you just can't do it anymore you know it's like a julear says that a polish is nothing but a sense of

1:14:51finer and finer scratches and so you know sticks are kind of scratchy they're kind of sketchy and so when you've brought it to a level that you cannot improve it that much more you say hey I'm finished and Sam would always say well are we are we finished and I'd say I'm good I will start saying in the morning because it's the the end of the third week we always finish on time and I said Sam I'm feeling like it's getting finished I think it is and like two hours before we represent I said tell the volunteers that we're just about to finish so they do not want to finish yeah we want to finish they don't want to stop yeah because it's been such a good fun time and so it's like okay we're gonna finish and we'll let an hour before I say you know we're almost finished everybody's polishing by then they're going around and fixing up and tucking in yeah trying to make the surface look homogenous in some way okay we're finished now and then we all step back we

1:15:52have to have a circumambulation and we walk all the way around the piece and we look at it we everybody there and sometimes people will be waiting for us to finish like a new harmony Indiana we finished and the whole town came and we had an impromptu opening and everybody walked around we said this is what we meant to do and this is what we did what do you all think you know and so you know that's another a huge high point because there's so much friendship involved and often times you know people will come from bring their neighbors and it's really fun oh how wonderful well if you ever need volunteers let me know thank you I think that you should go home and get yourself some willow I think I might need to yeah not as hard as you think all right I'm gonna I gotta get my clippers and my gloves that's all you need and a good idea yeah and a good idea thank you so much yeah thank you so ask wonderful people weepy questions because if you didn't get yourself

1:16:58across the country to meet them would you regret it of course I'm so thankful to Patrick for letting me come and visit him and Linda and Sam and the snake again follow him at Patrick Dirty sculptor on Instagram he is wonderful you can see all sorts of work by him you can also find out more about him at alleyward.com slash allergies slash salixology where we have a ton of links and notes for that we are at allergies on Instagram and blue sky I'm at alleyward on both we have small g's which are shorter kid friendly episodes all ages those are in their own feed wherever you go to find podcasts thank you to Aaron Talbert for managing the allergies podcast Facebook group avalanne malloc makes our professional transcripts kelly our doyer does our website our scheduling producer bending everything into the right part of the calendar is no well still worth our managing director who gets up on scaffolds to oversee everything is Susan hail and of course the flexible

1:17:58and strong Jake chafey and lead editor Mercedes-Mateland put this whole thing together Nick Thorburn made the theme music if you stick around until the very end of the episode I tell you secret and if somewhere in the middle of this outro things started sounding a little bit weird that is because I work at a co-working space and I was in the sound booth there and they closed and they straight up were like I'm so sorry you have to go and I had like 30 seconds more of this outro to record and oh my god oh my gosh totally one second oh my god I have to go oh my gosh yo no no look credit to them I was absolutely like five ten minutes over time so that's on me so I am in the front yard of my co-working space I'm ducked under a bush right now traffic's going by it's rush hour you want to see how under a bush I am that's some leaves I'm standing under I'm literally hiding under a fight guess right now which it seems fitting for this episode and uh that's my

1:18:58secret is I'm not the best at time management but I do love the job okay go look at Patrick's work huff some bark bend a twig get off your phone get under a bush right bye bye yeah well yes right well oh with the discovered cashback card it's payback time when you earn cashback on everyday purchases activate and earn 5% cashback at different categories each quarter on up to fifteen hundred dollars in purchases that's five percent cashback at different places each quarter like grocery stores on gas and at restaurants it pays to discover terms apply see discover dot com slash five for details turn up the heat at mgm grand this summer relax by one of Las Vegas's most iconic pool

1:20:05complexes discover exciting new dining experiences and keep the energy going all night long book your summer escape today