Last week I was in Austin, Texas to give one of my favourite talks, about using art in a garden. I was there as part of a series called Garden Spark, arranged by writer and gardener extraordinaire, Pam Penick. (You can find her regular blogs at www.penick.net/digging) The talk was held outdoors at Barton Springs…
Broadwoodside is the garden of Robert and Anna Dalrymple. Located some 20 miles east of Edinburgh in Gifford, East Lothian, Broadwoodside is a garden of subtle humour and artful plantings. When the Dalrymples bought the property in the late 1990s, it was nothing but a collection of derelict farm buildings. Since then, under their direction, gardener…
Edward Lutyens once said that a garden “should have a backbone — a central idea beautifully phrased.” The central and beautifully phrased idea of the International Garden Festival at the Reford Gardens in Métis, Québec is to offer garden installations that challenge conventional ideas of what a garden is — or can be. For the…
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.…
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,…
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…
The In Transit / En Route trail starts at the edge of a field. with a sign that asks a rather odd question. Where are you? Où êtes-vous? As I wrote in my previous post (In Transit / En Route: the beginning), the words aren’t easy to read. The letters are small and the words run together with…
In my post last week I mentioned In Transit / En Route and showed a photo of a clearing in the woods. Here’s the photo again. In Transit/En Route: the sundial clearing in the woods Do you see the red sign in the clearing? It is part of In Transit, or En Route in French, an installation…
People respond differently to the woods that are a big part of the landscape at Glen Villa It’s hard to miss the difference. Some hike through the forest intent on getting someplace, noticing very little. Others spy things I’ve never seen. The art installations I’m creating throughout the property generate widely different reactions. For some people,…