Life on Merchants Millpond is incredibly dense, layered in colors as elaborate as rococo wallpaper. This image has a peculiar, flattened perspective like an engraving by Albrecht Durer. It would make a good frontispiece for a medieval German folktale of children lost in an enchanted forest.

A pair of water tupelo grow from common ground. Tupelo often grows in distorted shapes, limbs contorted like the writhing bodies in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s allegories. On a winter night with the north wind blowing and clouds scudding across the face of the moon, it’s easy to imagine the tupelo abandoning themselves to the dance like witches on their sabbath.