Ars longa, vita brevis… When Hippocrates wrote these lines, he was not referring to fine art but to the ‘art’ of medicine. In effect, he was saying that it takes a long time to acquire knowledge and to perfect skills — and we have only a short time to do that. (I’d add that the…
Is it something in the air? Recently I’ve been reading discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of using sculpture in a garden. Does it add or detract? Some have argued in favour; others are vehemently opposed. The strongest statement of opposition I’ve read came from a New Zealand gardener, newspaper columnist and blogger named Abbie Jury.…
Worth Avenue defines high end shopping in Palm Beach, Florida. High end appears in a different guise at a junction beside the avenue, where a vertical garden clothes a bare wall. Eleven different types of plants make up this wall. Late day shadows make the wall look less interesting than it is, but a close-up…
Combining sculpture and a collection of rare palms, the Ann Norton Sculpture Garden offers a quiet retreat from the up-scale social whirl of Palm Beach, Florida. Palm Beach, after all, was (and in some cases still is) home or vacation playground for many of the world’s rich and famous, from the Kennedy and Pulitzer families,…
Must a garden have flowers? Must it have trees and shrubs? Must it have plants at all? I think most people would say yes. But consider England’s great landscape gardens. Some of those designed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown in the late 1700s had few if any flowers. And what about that masterpiece of garden art, the…
The end of January isn’t the obvious time to do a year-end review, but since 2013 is well and truly over, it’s now or never. And since next week marks the one year anniversary of this blog, and I plan to review some of the top posts and your comments about them, writing a month…
A few months ago Don Stratham, a New York state garden consultant, wrote a blog post about garden mishaps, or learning from failures in the garden, in his blog called Rooting for Ideas. He listed some of his mistakes — and what they had taught him. But what his post made me think of was…
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. But planning ahead for the garden is a regular winter activity. So this is what I plan (correction: make that hope) to do in 2014. 1. Clean up loose ends. This category includes more things than I like to think about. I often start new projects before the old…
How hard can it be to go from this… On the beach in Perth, West Australia to this? A snowy day at Glen Villa Very hard! But it is even harder to go to this… Montreal on a cold win’ter’s day: the view from my apartment window When I left Perth, West Australia, on Friday,…
Jeff Koons is not my favourite artist. In fact, I don’t really like his work. But I do like his Puppy. And I loved the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, inside and out. Koons’ Puppy is suitably festive outside Frank Gehry’s trademark gay curves. In the plaza next to the museum, towering over pedestrians, Koons’ highland terrier is a…