Q. Remember that local artist’s daffodil installation in the Arb a number of years ago? Who did that, and where have all the daffodils gone?

A. Susan Skarsgard called it “Imagine/Align.” In October 2003, she organized 150 volunteers to plant a half-mile-long line of Narcissus Marieke bulbs. “The overall concept came from an idea to metaphorically draw an arbitrary line through an open landscape using daffodils as the medium,” she emails. “The meadow area that your reader refers to, was mowed over too early about 5 years after the first bloom and the bulbs did not recover, so that’s why that area has no flowers… 16 years later (see recent photo below, from 2020) there are remnants of the planting that continue to bloom every year…”

Skarsgard has recently worked with General Motors to document its aesthetic history. Last October she published Where Today Meets Tomorrow: Eero Saarinen and the General Motors Technical Center.

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