About

The living Earth—Gaia—is constantly spinning, experiencing day and night, over and over, as it makes a sweeping revolution around the sun. And because Gaia spins on a tilt, in the north and south, we experience changing seasons. Over millions of these revolutions together, plants in higher latitudes have evolved to come alive and go dormant, come alive and go dormant, benefiting from the growing light and warmth, and conserving energy in the dark cold months.

In recent centuries, humans have mostly put ourselves, our holidays, and our accomplishments at the center of our annual calendars. But in the process we have forgotten that nature marks time far better than we do: with the running of maple sap, with the eruption of skunk cabbages, with the emergence of fireflies, and the falling of acorns, and then leaves, before the cycle begins again.

This calendar conveys the essence of our local ecological rhythm in southern New England. Each band of the circle swells and contracts based on the timing of natural occurrences. The outer band represents precipitation, then moving inward are bands for the leafing, flowering, and fruiting of 20 key tree and shrub species as tracked over the past 30+ years by the Harvard Forest. Bands thicken as more species enter each phase, expressing the collective ecological pulse of the season. Finally, everything revolves around the central sun, with its rays signifying the amount of daylight received by this region of Earth, the Northeast Coastal Zone (Level III Ecoregion 59, according to EPA classification).

We hope you find both inspiration and enlightenment from this new way of looking at a year, and that it makes you pause and examine the fragile flowers of a shadbush, the unfurling of a new birch leaf, or the gentle fluttering of a maple seed as it spins to the ground, and notice the cycles of Gaia all around you, all year round.

Art and research by Jon Schroth. Text by Erik Assadourian.

https://cyclesofgaia.com/poster