The family-tree chart behind this desk is drawn as gardeners understand trees: roots first, branches after, nothing labelled.
A genealogy you cannot read. The chart is a framed page of abstract branching lines — a trunk dividing upward, roots dividing downward, ink only. No names, no dates, no little boxes with marriages in them. Every life at this desk is invented, and an invented ancestry written out in names would be a forgery; drawn as bare branches, it is simply a shape of belonging.
The seed packet and the chart are the same idea at two scales. The packet is a beginning you can hold; the chart is a hundred beginnings you cannot. Portraits composed between them inherit both moods: intimate at the desk, ancestral on the wall.
Keeping the chart quiet. It hangs behind the sitter, softly out of focus. If a generation sharpens it, adds labels or hangs it crooked like a poster, cull the frame. The chart should feel inherited, not installed.
When you brief your own sitting, mention the chart once, in the background line of the brief, and never describe what is ‘on’ it beyond branches. Detail invites lettering; vagueness keeps the ink abstract.