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…
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,…
Travelling is wonderful, but nothing beats being at Glen Villa on a perfect autumn day, when the air is clear, the sky is blue and nothing in particular has to be done. This morning I walked around the garden, my first walk-about in three weeks. A few flowers are still blooming, like the never-say-die sedum…
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…
Mosaiculture is the name given to three dimensional sculptures made of plants. This summer, the Montreal Botanical Garden played host to dozens of creations from around the world, all illustrating the theme, Land of Hope. I postponed visiting the show until a few weeks ago, thinking I wouldn’t like it. But I did. I was captured by…
Recently I saw a photo of a giant yellow ducky floating in Hong Kong harbour. Called Spreading Joy Around the World, it’s by the Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. And it is BIG: 54 ft, or 16.5 metres, tall. The artist said it was intended to make people feel happy. It worked. It made me smile.…
What makes a good memorial? This question continues to occupy my mind, and not only because of the memorials I saw recently in Washington, D.C. and wrote about here. For more than two years I’ve been thinking about a creating a memorial to my mother who died in 2010 at the age of 97, after a full…
I spent Easter weekend visiting Washington D.C. with my husband and my sister. We were hoping to see cherry blossoms colouring the sky but it has been too cold and the buds are only now beginning to open. So no photos of pink blossoms, although the photo below shows how gloriously bent and mis-shapen the…
Several weeks ago I started a three-part series about an art installation at Glen Villa called In Transit / en Route. I posted the first two parts and intended to post the third in week three. But California and all I saw there captured my attention and my blogging time. So the third part of In…