Story behind the art of Lara Call Gastinger
Botanical Art Worldwide 2025-A More Abundant Future:
Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field
American Society of Botanical Artists at the Foundry Art Centre, St. Charles, MO
Tepary Bean
Phaseolus acutifolius
When I was brainstorming ideas of specimens for this painting, my friend, Marlo Meyer, at Meyerhof Farm in Northern California posted on Instagram about growing tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius) in collaboration with Southern Exposure Seed Exchange based in Mineral, Virginia.
When I found out that tepary beans are indigenous to the southwestern US and Mexico and have been cultivated since pre-Columbian times, I was intrigued and wanted to learn more. The first record of tepary beans was about 2500 years ago in the Tehuacán Valley in Mexico. The Tohono O’odham nation, living in the Sonoran Desert, is known for the cultivation and usage of these beans. In one of their myths, when the white tepary beans were scattered into the sky they created the patterns of the Milky Way.
Among all crops, tepary beans are renowned for their drought tolerance and quick development into beans. They were commonly grown alongside squash and corn, staples of the diets of Native Americans. They have a range of colors and are prized like many beans for their high protein, calcium, and fiber, even having more protein than navy and pinto beans! Their laudable nutrition and ability to thrive in drought conditions has even placed them on lists of plants for the future, with the capacity to feed many and ability to adapt to climate change and the warming planet.
I was grateful to receive five packets of beans from Native Seeds/SEARCH based in Tucson Arizona. This included Kitt Peak wild, blue speckled (from high elevation areas of Mexico and associated with the Mayans), Cocopah brown (from the lower Colorado River), black, and Sonoran white tepary varieties.
I grew them in my garden in Charlottesville, Virginia. Like many regions around the world, we have been experiencing increased summer droughts and I was hopeful that these delicate twining plants would thrive in these tough conditions. Their leaves grew and multiplied yet I anxiously waited for the flowers to appear. I avoided watering them to encourage flower production and eventually white and pink flowers bloomed and developed into pods (legumes). I collected the legumes, waited until they dried, split them open, and collected the seeds. The black, Sonoran white, and Cocopah brown varieties grew the best in my little garden. I might have enough seeds for a bowl of soup! The other varieties either did not germinate or did not thrive.
When I was working on this painting, I started at the bottom of my sheet of Fabriano Artistico 300 lb. paper. I wanted my painting to grow on the paper in tandem with the plants growing in the garden. I worked from photographs in my garden of individual leaves, flowers, and pods. I routinely collected part of plants and sometimes pulled up an entire plant to work from, storing it in a plastic bag to minimize wilting. When I pulled up a plant, I was excited to see nitrogen fixing nodules on the roots, something typical of plants in the legume family. In my garden, I noticed that the leaf structure changed throughout the day. As each day got hot, the leaves would fold into themselves and minimize their leaf exposure to the sun. I depicted this in the left most specimen in my painting. I learned that this was a strategy to adapt to hot conditions.
While I was creating this watercolor painting, I was restless and created another tepary bean composition but in pen. I enjoyed the process of working in watercolor while working on another piece in pen at the same time. It helped me learn to know the plant better as I went along.
My goal was to have this painting be a story of the development of a tepary bean plant. From the seed all the way back to the seed, I hope this painting shows how this delicate tangled bean grows and opens the viewer’s eyes to a plant that could become very important and helpful in our new climate.
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Read more about this artist's work: 27th Annual