DryStoneGarden

Stone Sculpture by Edwin Hamilton

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.

Late Show Demo Garden

Late Show Demo Garden

Late Show Demo Garden

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. (more…)