R. Fraley

Plants

A study of green resilience — ferns unfolding in shade, trees rising through light, wildflowers marking the seasons, and vines tracing paths between them.

Trees

This gallery explores the diversity of North American trees — from sunlit birch groves and sugar maples to red pine plantations and alpine firs. Each species reveals a strategy for survival: thick bark against fire, flexible trunks against wind, or leaves timed to the rhythm of light and frost.

Here, the changing forms of bark, branch, and leaf trace the story of the continent’s forests.

The architecture of light and air.
A stillness between order and wildness, where the human hand fades into the forest’s design.

Red Pine Stand
Conifers
The architecture of light and air.
Their trunks and canopies define the woodland — steady, sheltering, and ever-changing through the seasons.

Deciduous Trees
Deciduous

Ferns

Ferns Ferns
Patterns older than the forest itself.
Fronds unfurl through shade and moisture, tracing ancient geometries beneath the canopy.

Vines

Vines
Vines
Threads through the understory.
Climbing and weaving through trunks and stone, vines find their shape in motion — the forest’s living lines.

Wildflowers

Black-eyed Susan
Black-eyed Susan
A bright prairie coneflower catching the summer light.
Golden petals radiate from a dark velvet disk — a simple, enduring emblem of the Midwest’s warm months.

Canada Goldenrod
Canada Goldenrod
A resilient bloom standing tall through the frost.
A lone stem crowned with pale seed tufts catches the morning light — its quiet endurance marking the meadow’s shift from autumn to winter.

Rue Anemones in soft spring light
Rue Anemones in soft spring light
Blossoms emerging through tender green leaves.
A small colony of Rue Anemones opens beneath the forest canopy — the morning air still cool, the forest floor alive with new color.