The Chronicle

Spent time back in the field before the sun set last night. This year and the new growth is looking amazing.

The Phoenix Row is doing exactly what I hoped. More variety than last year. The Labyrinth branching forms are appearing earlier in the season. I'm watching a few plants that don't have names yet.

I want to start documenting by voice and video now instead of the handwritten logs. Going back in tomorrow at first light.

She started Cristata and kept going. By the time I was looking for her to settle, she had become something between Cristata and Phoenix Form — crested at the crown, sculptural everywhere else.

I've been documenting these transitions for years but this year was the first time I had language for it. Phoenix Form. The form that refuses a single classification.

That's when I understood what this project was actually about.

The dual taxonomy system is finally documented. Every plant now gets two readings — the scientific one and the Garden Phoenix one. Ember. Rosefire. Molten Core. Smoke Veil.

I've been calling them by these names in my head for years. Writing them down made them real in a different way.

Row 3, Plant 7. The moment I walked past her, I stopped. I didn't know her name yet. I just knew she was different from the others in her row — a deeper rosefire, the ember at every tip, the fountain branching already visible in her young form.

She was hot and deep and she knew it.

Dragon Brandy arrived before I knew what to call her. The name came while I was standing there in the field at golden hour, watching the light catch her plumes. Sometimes the name finds the plant before the field notes do.

I had seen plants carry two forms before. But never like this — not with this completeness. She held a Cristata crown in one section and a full Plumosa plume in another, and they existed on the same stem without confusion or compromise.

That is what Chimera Phoenix is. She is the proof that the categories we built around this plant are not the plant's truth.

She is the taxonomy refusing to hold.

A curiosity. A fascination. No plan, no protocol, no archive in mind. Just a plant that stopped me.

I grew celosia for the first time and couldn't look away. Every part of her was beautiful — from those first two leaves. I didn't know yet that I would spend the next decade trying to understand why.

The relationship began before I knew I was in one.

Every year: more plants, more varieties, more noticing. Adding commercial lines, watching what happened when they crossed, saving seeds without yet knowing why it mattered. The field growing in scale and in complexity.

Looking back, this was the project — the long accumulation of attention that made 2024 possible. But at the time it was just a compulsion. A pull toward the field that didn't have a name yet.

The flowers were practicing. So was the observer. Neither of them knew it.