Crafting Gifts From Nature’s Storehouse

She has sketched the 300,000-year-old bones of ancient man and drawn the fossils of the extinct ground sloth. She has peered through a microscope at the hairs on a fly in a painstaking search for artistic accuracy.

Now Danish-born scientific illustrator Inger Achton Dix is channeling her creative energies in another direction: She makes whimsical creatures from nature’s storehouse.

Dix, 80, heads a group of 10 other volunteers who craft gifts from peacock feathers, twigs and seed pods at the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum.

They work in a wooden shed nestled in the 127-acre garden. Their all-natural creations--from painted walnut-shell skunks to prickly poodles fashioned from liquidambar pods--bring in more than $3,000 a year for the arboretum’s gift shop.

“We make funny little animals,” Dix said, holding up what looked like a cross between an aardvark and an armadillo, formed from eucalyptus pods, with stems of magnolia seedpods for legs. The creature, like other whimsical animals in the menagerie, sells for $2.95 to $4. Other handcrafted items are priced from $1 for vases of straw flowers to $30 for basket arrangements and wreaths.

“Sometimes we do buy ribbon or silk flowers to add a bit of color,” she confessed.

Dix attended art schools in Copenhagen and Berlin. After she graduated, a zoologist taught her scientific illustration.

She was hired to catalogue the 3,000-piece Mongolian collection of Danish explorer Henning Haslund-Christensen at the National Museum of Copenhagen, faithfully reproducing the ornate headdresses, tents and household items on paper.

In 1947, she arrived in New York with $50 in her pocket and started work at the Museum of Natural History. Her job was to sketch fossils for anthropologist Franz Weidenreich.

Then she moved to Caltech, where she drew the bones of the ground sloth. She stopped working as a professional illustrator in 1952 but continued to draw and paint for pleasure.

In 1971 she exchanged her paintbrush and India ink for seeds, flowers and a glue applicator when she joined the arboretum’s 300-member volunteer corps. But she hasn’t lost her scrupulous attention to detail, and agonizes over traces of glue on the crafts.

“She gives it everything she’s got,” said Grace Robinson, another volunteer in the crafts group, which meets Tuesday mornings. “She’s very fastidious about what she makes. Everything has to be in good order before she lets it go to the gift shop.”

Dix estimates she spends about 50 to 70 hours a week at her arboretum “job.” In addition, she pots plants at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino and performs folk dances several times a year at Danish clubs.

“I work harder now as a retiree than when I was paid!” she said. “I can’t sit still. I have to work with my hands.”