The self-styled "Keeper of the Plant Parts" creates sculptures and framed artworks out of seeds and dried plant artifacts. He has racks filled with rows and rows of the beautiful, soft puffs made when a goatsbeard flower goes to seed. Besides his more formal artworks, Solomon sells elegant glass vessels filled with the ethereal goatsbeard spheres.

Hanging on a wall are eight of what Solomon calls "storyteller staffs," which he makes from plant stalks, bark and grasses of contrasting textures. One employs a long piece of the woody base of a palm frond and, from the same tree, a flower stalk bound in two places with grasses.

A single cottonwood leaf and a goatsbeard "seed head," the cluster of seeds left when a flower dies, adorn the totemic sculpture. The artist tied the flower halfway up its length when it still was closed so that after it opened, it would look like a tiny ballerina's tutu.

"I view my studio as being the hut of a shaman or of a mad botanist," Solomon said in a recent interview at his Galisteo home. "This is all one long experiment, gathering plants and finding new ways of working with them."

He picked up a piece of the seed head of a marsh cattail plant and rubbed, demonstrating how the fluff slowly explodes from the brown head. He makes good use of this soft whitish material in his framed pieces.

One of the handmade maple frames Solomon used, which is about 2 inches deep, features two goatsbeard seed puffs spread out like little mandalas against a background of the cattail fluff. Another, larger frame contains 15 small collections of seeds and pods nestled in the soft fur.

"I don't do fungi or algae," Solomon said with an obvious distaste for what he called those "lower plant forms." His passion is grounded in the world of flowering plants and the seeds they produce.

During the interview for this story, he invoked "the magic of the seed," rhapsodizing about the tiny, rugged marvel that contains a life recipe for a 3-inch chickweed or a 350 foot redwood tree.

On the back cover if its November-December 1998 issue, World Watch magazine featured Solomon's High Energy, which exhibits two swirls of grass seeds on a black background. An accompanying essay reminded readers the seeds of grain plants are "still the main energy source for the people who run the technologies that run the industrial world."

Solomon didn't always have such a profound feeling for flora. Raised in Chicago and Los Angeles, he spent decades in the business world. He founded a marketing firm, Jimini Productions, in 1968. Six years later, the company's clients included Fortune 500 firms in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.

In the early 1980's, Solomon was a consultant to the World Wildlife Fund. "I learned about the endangered species and I was brought in on some groundbreaking marketing. Then one day a beautiful clump of grass caught my eye. I bent over, pulled it up and held it to the sky and asked how I could make my way in the world with this beauty."

The answer?

"This work I'm doing is it," Solomon said. "I only developed the ability to make things instinctively. I'm totally self-taught. It's an ongoing experiment."

He advanced his work during a period spent at the Ojai Foundation, a California sanctuary devoted to education and to land stewardship. He and anthropologist Joan Halifax co-produced a month long event, Awakening the Dream: The Way of the Warrior, which Solomon said brought together two dozen shamans, teachers and psychologists to present information from many disciplines.

"I learned the value of ritual and ceremony as a means of reconnection with self," he wrote in a biography passage on his Internet site, http://www.seedshaman.com.

The alchemy of his experiences has yielded a view of his work as "ceremonial, from another time and place," he said.

One of his sculptures, Song of the Seeds, brings to mind a musical instrument formed by the hands of Pan by moonlight.

"It's the first and oldest stringed instrument ever," Solomon said of the piece. "It's my interpretation of how I imagined the world's first stringed instrument. The strings are yucca fibers. A magical human once played it."

Solomon has a limited color palette at his disposal. Most of the pods, pieces of bark, branches, roots, grasses, leaves and seeds occupy the brownish segment of the spectrum. But they have a great variety of textures and shapes. His materials range from the favorite goatsbeard seed -- its soft, fairy-puff parachute -- to the hard, dark curves of devil's claw, a plant that grows in Southern New Mexico.

His sculptures' detail, of both texture in the plant parts and ingenuity in their composition, inspires wonder.

In Vessel of Future Tomorrow's, Solomon composed pieces of cottonwood bark into a boat shape and filled the container with small, dried flower heads. The craft sits on pontoons of tightly wrapped stalks. Woven plant fibers secure the whole.

His largest work is Earth Shield. The 6-foot-tall sculpture, an inverted triangle in form, has a structure based on three large cross-shaped roots. He placed wrapped circles of grass in a line down the center.

"It's a work of art but also a sacred object," Solomon said. "All my pieces are ceremonial. There are parts of Earth Shield that I've carried around for up to 10 years and all of a sudden, they worked; they belonged."

"Richard Solomon's work calls us back to those cultures and traditions (that) recognized and revered the seed and its display of life," Halifax is quoted saying in Solomon's brochure. "Peoples have, in many parts of the world, created works of art, worshiped and offered seed and plant as a way to reconnect themselves with the mystery of birth and death.

"They have celebrated the plant as healer, nourisher, source of vision and wisdom as well as clothing and shelter. His sculptures, if they can be called that, are medicine bundles for modern society.

Praise of nature is paramount in Solomon's worldview.

"I love the science and magic of the patterns you find in nature," he said. "When I collect or cut something, I say, "Thank you, Beauty." It's my way of acknowledging the seed, the plant.

"The key problem for humans is a lack of respect for nature," he said. "You don't have to throw that beer can out the window in the mountains, or for that matter, your gum wrapper on Madison Avenue. Part of my mission is to help people see and honor the beauty in nature."

Solomon still pays the bills by doing consulting work in marketing, but he isn't as enthusiastic about that as he once was.

"I've become cynical," he said. "I used to get excited when I'd meet with Gillette about a new campaign, but I think now the world is overpopulated with products."

For the future, Solomon would like to do some larger sculptures and is thinking about marketing his designs for use on fabrics and stationery