Avena
Avena barbata
More classically framed is this larger specimen in a black gallery frame. The print is 22" x 30" with a 2 inch margin for an overall dimension of 26" x 34". It was donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Glassell School Gala for 2012, and rests with a patron of the museum.
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I found this splendid grass in an area of Northeastern Oregon along the Old Oregon Trail Highway on 29 May 2008. My companion Mary and I were on a road trip to Seattle from Houston, collecting grasses along the way. Somewhat tired from a long trip from Newport Oregon that morning, we pulled off at a rest stop on Interstate 84 overlooking the terraced fields around Pendleton. For some time we had traveled through irrigated agricultural land on our way to Baker, but suddenly the road began to climb into the foothills of the Blue Mountains at Emigrant Hill. Privately owned farms abruptly changed into Umatilla Indian Reservation land and prairie landscapes of the Colorado Plateau reasserted themselves. There were a number of grasses unfamiliar to the both of us, and none showed such a potential for use as botanical prints as the grass found in the rest stop at a few places. I took some of the specimens and placed them in my herbarium press that night at Baker. When I got back to Texas with my pressed grasses I was able to key out Avena barbata at the botanical laboratory of Jennifer Rudgers, James and Deborah Godwin Assistant Professor at Rice University with her generous assistance. It was difficult to determine exactly, and may be a hybrid of unknown mixture, an ephemeral and rather accidental grass. The print is 15" x 22" framed against a three inch mitered grass cloth wallpaper mat in a natural wood frame 21" x 28". The framed piece was donated to the 2011 Gala for the Museum of Printing History, and is now held in a private collection by a patron of the museum. 
Avena barbata
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