“She Who Waits,” an original acrylic painting copyright Susan A. Walton of S. A. Walton Studio, Hudson, Florida.

Artist’s note:

This multimedia piece, featuring an arachnid familiar to many American gardeners, includes a web made from fine, iridescent sewing thread embedded in the paint.

The little huntress on the web is an Argiope aurantia spider, the name meaning ‘gilded silver-face,’ and they are a widespread, common garden spider in the Americas, and even in Hawaii.

One of this spider’s trademarks is the zigzag design in the center of its web called the stabilatum, which the spider weaves into their beautiful, meticulously constructed webs.

If you disturb the resident spider, it may violently vibrate the web in an effort to shoo you away; but that’s about it. They are good helpers in the garden, when left alone, but if captured, they may be forced to bite. Usually they will slip away out of the web, avoiding trouble, if you persist.

I have never been bitten even after accidentally face-planting in their webs while mowing; they just scramble away to safety. When going back the following day, I find the web rebuilt in the same location - only several feet higher- so that it will not be in my way again. This demonstrates that they have a capacity for learning and problem-solving to accommodate the traffic situation in their immediate neighborhood.

This one has chosen to build its web in a Rough-Leaved Dogwood, a small and pretty native tree of the Midwest known for its lovely white berries. I spotted this spider in a whole grove of these trees while on a nature walk with a dear friend, Rick Hobusch, north of St. Louis, Missouri. Rick is a very private and thoughtful person; he listens carefully as if everything you say is important, can keep a secret like no one else, and modestly never speaks about himself. He minds his own business, and like many of my associates is an enthusiast of archaeology and “primitive”technology in particular. He makes stone blades of flint like those made by earlier cultures in the St. Louis area, and in the course of doing that, goes about the region looking for chert to nap into arrow points and spear points and knives, finding amazing places along the way. He is always learning more about history, geology, and is a good observer.

That day he had taken me to his favorite paw paw patch, where we found quite a lot of the sweet fruit ripe for the picking, or at least as close as you can get it before opossums or raccoons beat you to them. The woods along the Mississippi and Missouri are on rich soil loaded with paw paw trees, and in some years even the wildlife cannot eat these “Ozark bananas” as fast as they ripen and fall.

If you are unfamiliar with pawpaws, they are small trees which bear North America’s largest native fruit, and the most common species, the type in Missouri, has simple but very large, almost tropical-looking leaves that are arranged vaguely in semicircles. Once you realize this, they can be spotted some distance away. Like other temperate forest trees they are deciduous and drop their leaves to go dormant through the winter. In spring they bloom, and the blooms are quite unusual. In Missouri they are maroon red. (Pawpaws here in my part of Florida have small leaves and the blooms are white with a red splotch on each petal.) The pollination of pawpaw trees is done by mostly by flies.

The heavy fruit grows in clusters, is pale green on the outside, darkening as it ripens, but best just before the color changes. The inside is yellow, very sweet, and richly custard like, with quite a few large, dark seeds. He who hesitates, vegetates, because there are hordes of animals out there intending to gorge themselves on them when the fruit is in season.

Anyway, back to our hike. Solomon’s seal grew in every gully, and the soil was dark and rich, supporting an enormous number of paw paw trees. They are known to sucker, so if you find one loaded with fruit you can be sure it has many nearby sisters just like it, loaded with fruit as well.

We also stopped to visit a fine tall-grass prairie that day, and along the edges of the prairie, on one side, were masses of these rough-leaved dogwoods bearing clusters of beautiful, white berries.

I noticed the spider tucked back in between two of the trees, and thought of how I would try to render the delicate, iridescent silk of her web with a clumsy paintbrush and paint later, back in my studio, while enjoying those pawpaws.

After many tries with a brush that proved unsatisfactory, I recalled a spool of iridescent thread in my sewing cabinet left over from making a baby quilt for a nephew. Perfect!

- Susan A. Walton

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