The Time of the Caatinga: Between Greenery and Bloom

On May 2nd, I began another field trip in the district of Pilar, in the municipality of Jaguarari, Bahia.

This time, I went with my mother to another place known as Vassourinhas. The beginning of the route was almost the same as a previous visit: the first 15 km followed the same road I had traveled about a month earlier.

But something caught my attention. This time, the landscape was different. Where there had once been many flowers especially the yellow ones that usually mark this path there was now a flowering silence. Very few flowers, almost none.

In contrast, the greenery was intense. The recent rains had transformed the landscape, and the vegetation responded in another way: fewer flowers, more green presence.

We are in autumn, a transitional season in the semiarid region, and this becomes visible in the field not only in what emerges, but also in what withdraws.

When we arrived at Vassourinhas, near the areas with water and rocky formations, the scenery changed once again. There, I found a few flowers, and it was at that moment that I made a quick sketch of one of them a first gesture of documentation that will later mature into a more developed study.

The next day, back in Petrolina, I ran 21 km. During the same period, in another territory, I found trees in full bloom. It reminded me that:

Even within the same biome, each place has its own time, its own response, its own rhythm.

The Caatinga does not bloom uniformly. It expresses itself in layers, in distinct temporalities, in sensitive geographies and it is in this interval, between what blooms and what withdraws, that the drawing begins.