Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
‘Iron Tree comprises 99 elements cast in iron… interlocked using a classic – and here exaggerated – Chinese method of joining, with prominent nuts and screws.’
From the Yorkshire Sculpture Park notes
Glimpsed from a distance, Ai Weiwei’s fake trees pass as real, but dead. As you draw closer, your mind engages with the forms and construction and questions arise. What is it? Why is it? Are the branches actually roots? Is it wood? Continue reading “Ai Weiwei’s Iron Tree (2013)”
Artists Arno Coenen, Iris Roskam and Hans van Bentem turned Damrak’s Beurspassage into a work of art called ‘Amsterdam Oersoep’. Symbolic elements of this watery city are featured on a mosaic design that covers the barrel vaulted ceiling, including bicycles and aquatic creatures. Continue reading “Beurspassage, Amsterdam Oersoep”
Mayflower Primary School’s sensory garden, It All Makes Sense, was one of my favourite corners of the Chatsworth Flower Show 2019. If there’s a child in your life, you might like to take some inspiration from these recycled tin cans, painted with cheerful motifs. Pop a herb or a flower in one and you have a tiny garden to enjoy, with potential lessons in art, the environment, nature, nurturing and cookery along the way.
While my secondary school had a small greenhouse, I only have the vaguest memories of going inside it. We never did anything as exciting as making a garden for one of the RHS flower shows. I love it when I see some of the kids who have been involved at the shows, proud of what they’ve achieved and excited to explain to visitors what they were thinking about in this or that part of the garden.
I’m one of the lucky ones. Although my schooldays preceded the RHS Campaign For School Gardens by decades, my childhood was filled with small lessons like these as part of family life. Caterpillars in jars that turned into butterflies. Rose petal scented water. A succulent that grew in a pattern. Owl pellets to pull apart, looking for bones. Flowers to plant. Potatoes to dig (well before their time as we were too excited to wait). Pebbles to pick out of streams. A bat cave to explore. Continue reading “RHS Campaign For School Gardens, Chatsworth Flower Show”
If you’re like me, you can never see a gourd without a snatch of verse flickering in and out of focus in the recesses of your mind – this one:
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never ceaseKeats, from To Autumn
Now even the bees have been forced to admit that Autumn is a memory, and nights are longer, a great way to give a gourd new life is to turn it into a winter nightlight.
The ones pictured here are part of Thompson Farms of Raleigh, Mississippi’s collection of crafted gourd novelties that include tree decorations, mandalas, baskets and thunder gourds as well as luminaries. Continue reading “Gourd Luminaries By Thompson Farms”
A’net by Brenda Jet was one of the installations we were able to get up close and personal with during our stay at Broomhill Art Hotel and Sculpture Garden in Muddiford, North Devon. The garden is a naturalistic one that runs alongside a stream, through a meadow and in the woodland of a steep-sided valley.
Brenda Jet collects plastic waste, such as tangled fisherman’s twine which she patiently cleans, unravels, then winds into neat balls of raw material. The finished sculpture is felt-like, colourful and textural. Continue reading “A’net by Brenda Jet at Broomhill Sculpture Garden”
Clowns helter skelter after each other in what, we sense, ought to be an ordered line, but just isn’t. Embodied verbs, they pose, plunge, stumble, balance, strut, slip, bow and clamber, one or other body part defying gravity in that frozen moment to anchor the whole. Straight backs lend them dignity even as they take risks and cavort. We’re in the whimsical world of flamework glass artist, Hans Godo Fräbel, as seen at the Naples Botanical Garden, Florida, earlier this year. Continue reading “Reflections on Glass: Fräbel in the Garden”
Susan Rushton 