DryStoneGarden

I have some photos from the Late Show Gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma, the Bay Area’s new fall garden show, this past weekend. Cornerstone describes itself as “an eclectic collection of shops, wineries and a gourmet cafe set amidst nine acres of garden installations created by the world’s leading landscape architects.” LostintheLandscape has photos from a recent visit here and here. The Late Show Gardens, “the latest in design every fall,” is the new fall garden show hosted there. As they say in their tagline, the show is more about design than plants, and the demo gardens this year were all high-design, high-concept — a dinner table/water feature planted with edibles, a metaphor for global warming, corroded oil tankers and drums repurposed as planters. Garden Porn and Bay Area Tendrils already have photos up, and probably some other blogs, too. The demo gardens were all pretty interesting, but I was most impressed by the stone sculptures of Edwin Hamilton, a stoneworker whose work shows up regularly in books and magazines. Everyone always comments about how building rock walls is like putting together a giant puzzle, but his sculptures truly are put together like puzzles. Very tight.

This one started with a giant block of ice that melted and transformed the space into a reflecting pool, an unsubtle metaphor for global warming. It was pretty effective, actually, because of the cactus; it felt distinctly unsettling to see it in standing water. Kind of messed up to do that to a cactus, but I guess that’s the point.

We were checking out grasses for a couple of upcoming installs. I have photos of the grasses and some more sculpture by Edwin Hamilton below.

This lawn of Berkeley Sedge (Carex divulsa syn. tumicula) looks a little different than I expected. Berkeley Sedge gets pretty big, a foot or two high and easily two feet wide, in a planting, but it was a lot lower growing as a lawn. The sculpture is an installation made of bamboo and recycled wood, pretty cool.

Carex pansa is getting touted these days as an alternative for traditional lawns. The question is how well it takes traffic. Most people say it does, but there are dissenting voices out there. It’s showing heavy wear as a pathway here, but then most turf wouldn’t hold up to so much traffic either.

I usually dismiss strips of turf between hardscape as something architects do, an ill-advised way to get visual interest, with the turf usually over or under-watered, either squishy or half-dead. But the Garden Visceral Serenity by Yoji Sasaki has stood up really well over time, probably the best of all the gardens. Many of the other permanent installations show signs of their age, and several of them have had major elements redone since they were installed five years ago, but the Sasaki garden still looks like it did when it was first installed, the immutability of lawn. When you sit inside the big metal structure, relaxing on the cushions inside, there is indeed a visceral serenity as Sasaki promises.

The Oehme, Van Sweden installation with agaves and Mexican feathergrass was another testament to the power of a grass I try to avoid planting. I don’t know what the story is with the big stone ball. Edwin Hamilton has a big stone ball there, too.

— Update —

A Youtube video of the Late Show gardens. Nice images, but beware, the soundtrack is appalling.

Tags: carex, stone sculpture

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 7:54 am and is filed under public gardens, sculpture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.