Stoney Seed Pod

This looks to me like stone, an ancient carving of some sort, but it is in fact a Southern Blue Gum (eucalyptus globulus) seed pod - ever so beautifully captured by Anna Laurent.  Anna is a writer, producer, and photographer, with a focus on botany-related educational media.  

I find particularly inspiring her seed pod galleries, the images beg to be made into sculptures, I'm so excited about the possibilities here and love her knowledge of plants and descriptions of how the seeds form and what they require for germination and the processes of plant biology.  

Botany Blueprint is series of plant profiles that look at the form and function of seed pods. Each article begins with a specimen she has collected and photographed.  Individually, each photograph is a fine art portrait of a unique botanic specimen; as a series, it is a scientific inquiry into the diversity of botanic design. 

These images are luxuriantly exotic and so beautiful - I'm itching to make something inspired by them in stone.