A Smith Gallery - “Botanical” Photo Contest and Exhibition

• A Smith Gallery

• Deadline: February 17th 2025

• Prize: Exhibition + Sales + Publication

• Theme: Botanical

• Entry Fee: Yes

• REGISTRATION: CLOSED. Click HERE for more Opportunities

"It was said, though I didn’t know it at the time, that Finn, as a young man, read Thoreau’s Walden. I read it too, though I remember very little now. For Finn, though, it sparked something. It woke something up inside him. I heard from a mutual friend that Finn once tried to fix a window air conditioner in his backyard after reading the book—deciding he would become self-sufficient. I’m not sure how successful he was, but I know this: around that time, he began to see the natural world, especially plants, in a completely new way.

Before that, like me, he’d seen plants as just part of the background—a mass of green, grey, and brown. Growing up in East Texas’ dense pine forests, it was easy to miss the details. But afterward, he connected with the flora deeply, almost obsessively. He studied local botany, sought out natural remedies, and even befriended a Coushatta elder who taught him about the plants of the area—their uses as food, medicine, or otherwise. His passion showed everywhere: he collected plant-themed graphics, displayed his sister’s paintings of trees (poorly done, though not intentionally so), and even embraced an almost entirely carnivorous diet.

Now, we’re old men. Finn had three kids, I had five. He became a biology professor, while I ran a lawn irrigation business. Yet, through all this, we’ve played golf almost every week for forty years. If he passes before me, I’ll make sure people know about The True Taxonomy of The Flora of East Texas—a massive, illustrated book he created over thirty years. He renamed every plant in the Big Thicket, giving them unique names, like dubbing the sassafras tree “affable dinosaur foot.” I begged him to publish it. He could have been known—maybe even made some money—but Finn never cared about that. He just loved plants."