"Squash flowers small as
cell organelles, garden walls
miniscule as membranes." 

Like a floating garden, the cell is filled with many structures, including membranous sacks, or vesicles, that serve as containers. Here, a hanging gourd plant grows from one container, while red flowers emerge from others. A complex set of containers is the Golgi apparatus, with its flattened sacks within which macromolecules are processed, sorted and packaged. More containers are transport vesicles that both merge with and bud off from the Golgi apparatus. One large vesicle holds three seeds, which themselves contain the material for three whole new organisms. The gourds themselves are seen as containers of their own seeds. The outer cell membrane, like a skin or shell, encloses the entire cell, making it a unit separate from — but in constant communication with — the external world.

This painting depicts Nature neither as a photographic replica nor as numerical data nor a verbal description. It is a visual representation, not only of external Nature but also of the human mind’s capacity to create its own metaphorical model of Nature.