NEW SCOTLAND — Paul Steinkamp wishes that, when he was a child, someone had taught him how to fold a piece of paper in half.

As he talks about the art and science of origami, which he came to late in life, he sounds like a poet.

“The greatest gift you could ever give a child, as far as I’m concerned, is to introduce them to folding paper ….,” he says in this week’s Enterprise podcast. “You can fold paper for the rest of your life and you will still have some discovery … It’s a river. It reminds you you have a brain and you have fingers … It’s something that no other living thing can do.”

If you wrapped a peanut in a piece of paper, a crow would be able to unravel it to get the peanut and other birds might weave pieces of paper in a nest or a chipmunk might chew a piece of paper, muses Steinkamp, but no other being can fold paper, probably not even a chimpanzee.

A famous folder, a Japanese woman in her eighties who has been folding all her life, told him children as young as 3 could fold.

Steinkamp himself came to origami through his admiration for the paper coffee cups he got at the Mobil station in Voorheesville.

“I thought, gee, what a beautiful thing. It has a rolled rim, a seam glued, a wonderful bottom; it holds hot liquid, and can be printed on and it’s relatively cheap.”

Rather than throwing away the paper cups, he started “folding, cutting, and massing — connecting coffee cups, adding little tidbits of things to them.” He added an orange button to his painted sculpture.

Steinkamp believes he has the largest collection of succulents in the state and sometimes, just as with the orange button in the coffee-cup sculpture, he would put in his succulents “a little strange thing — some man-made, rusted encrusted thing to somehow bring the human element to this plant.”

Steinkamp and his wife, Mardell, who are now semi-retired, for decades ran Helderledge nursery on Picard Road at the base of the Helderberg escarpment.

Steinkamp grew up in Rhode Island, the son of a carpenter, one of five siblings in what he described as a poor neighborhood. He enjoyed planting trees in the yard and remembered squinting after planting a tree to see if it set right.

His mother would squint, too, he said, “And then she would laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh — and of course that’s what got me interested in plants. I was always working around the yard in front of my house.”

When a new neighbor moved in, a German who designed memorial plates, Steinkamp would do his bidding, digging six-foot holes, splashed with cement, to plant spruce trees. It was crazy, he said, but the trees grew. 

“I would empty his cesspool and we would take it around to the plants and in the vegetable garden,” Steinkamp recalled. The yard had a magnificent arborvitae tree — the German attributed its growth to the fact that his dachshund had been buried beneath it.

When Steinkamp was 15 or 16, he started working at a century-old wholesale greenhouse. Eventually, the owner loaned him money so he could study horticulture at the University of Rhode Island.

It was in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts where he met Mardell, an undergraduate. She sat in front of him in a class on landscape architecture.

 “She always wore her father's white shirt, and I knew she was always immaculate, you know? And I always said, ‘Boy, that is it,’” recalled Steinkamp.

Finally, after about a year of working up to it, Steinkamp along with the professor and some other students went out together with Mardell and saw a Tarzan movie.

Years later, happily married, and both working for the state of New York, the Steinkamps changed course. “She got cancer. Breast cancer. And we said, ‘Well, why don’t we do what we always wanted to do, have a nursery?’ And that is where it started.”

Over the years, the couple had 350 employees, Steinkamp said, many of whom they are still in touch with along with appreciative customers.

“Garden making is sky making,” said Steinkamp. “In other words, you are trying to form a place …. defined by the sky. The overhanging branches and the walls of the garden in which to find paradise, in which to come home and be in and say, ‘Ah, now I’m home and now I’m in nature. And now I’m modifying it. Right? I’m changing it.’ And that’s how it all started.”

The Steinkamps’ nursery is “very much a reflection of us — you try to make a pleasant place,” he said.

His folding, too, is a reflection of himself. In the folding, Steinkamp finds discovery and delight.

As part of an international group that meets through Zoom, Steinkamp learns from folders living in India, Japan, Korea, South America, Australia, Israel, Europe, and England. The members converse in “English with various accents,” he said.

While Steinkamp loves the art of folding, he also appreciates the advances it has made in science from heart stents to airbags in cars.

Describing the process he goes through when he is creating a sculpture, Steinkamp said, “You have an idea of what you’re folding but you don’t know where you’re going. And sometimes you can say you’ve made something and it’s interesting, right?

Twice, Stenkamp has attended the annual Origami USA conference in New York City. “It’s out of this world,” he said. Attendees sit at tables of eight. “And they’re folding and you’re looking at a person who is known throughout the world.”

Once, the queue was too long for him to join a group where he really admired an artful toad the instructor had folded.

“I met her afterwards and I said, ‘You know, I loved your toad … It was the most magnificent thing I’ve ever seen.’ She said, ‘Oh, well, sit right down. I’ll show you how to fold it.’” He concluded the story, “It’s always the sharing.”

Steinkamp is constantly thinking about paper — not just how to fold it, but appreciating the sound and feel of it, too.

He was at a bakery in St. Louis where he admired the muffin papers — folded 36 times to go around the muffin. The baker didn’t know where the papers had come from but Steinkamp tracked them down to Italy.

That led him to an appreciation of baking paper, parchment. He likes its translucence — so that if he folds a star and holds it up to the light, there is a pattern of overlap.

When he crumbles it into a ball — like a spitball without the spit — it creates a pattern in the paper.

“You may think it’s chaotic, but it is not chaotic,” Steinkamp says of the pattern. “It is a function of what happened when you squeezed it together,” which he said researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done computer analyses of.

“There is one final thing,” Steinkamp concludes. “You cannot go to bed at night …You think of a fold or a twist or a coil. And then, of course, that’s the end of it. It doesn’t go any further. You’ve just thought about it. Now you go to sleep.”