DryStoneGarden

In Europe I saw a new Piet Oudolf garden. It’s at a newish design museum, Vandalorum, outside a small town in Sweden. It’s great. The garden is pretty much the showcase of the museum — I only know about the museum because of it — and it was unquestionably the highlight for me. ‘Artistic museum planting’ has become quite a niche for Oudolf, he must have done close to a dozen at this point, and I don’t know of any other landscape designer or architect who has done anything like that. I’ve seen a half dozen gardens by him at this point and they’re always worth the effort to see. Really glad my route took me past this one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cycleboy1

Farmhouse1

BRW54137912C87C_002075

BRW54137912C87C_002111

BRW54137912C87C_002102

SkagenLighthouse

BRW54137912C87C_002107

BRW54137912C87C_002095

BRW54137912C87C_002103

BRW54137912C87C_002104

BRW54137912C87C_002099

BRW54137912C87C_002098

BRW54137912C87C_002106

Docks1

BRW54137912C87C_002112

BRW54137912C87C_002121

Skatoy

BRW54137912C87C_002109

Platform

BRW54137912C87C_002101

BRW54137912C87C_002110

BRW54137912C87C_002115

I rode a bicycle in Scandinavia again this summer, a mostly coastal loop around the sea. Starting in Denmark, I rode up the east coast of Jutland, ferried to Norway and rode a section of the southern coast, then took another ferry and rode through Sweden to get back to Copenhagen. It was all really nice. I rode a lot of separated bike paths, ate a lot of salmon and rye bread, and camped in a lot of lovely spots. I swam from rocks, docks, and platforms. I saw a lot of wheat fields and a surprising amount of California native Phacelia blooming as a cover crop. I picked a gluttonous amount of bilberries. These are my sketches. I brought along watercolors this year instead of colored pencils.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was back doing a bit of work in a garden from a couple years ago, took some photos.

The front included a lawn conversion.

I found a watercolor rendering in the ten year old real estate listing. I respect the watercolor technique but it’s a dated vision of suburbia. No one plays on a front yard lawn anymore, and guests should have a path to the front door that doesn’t squeeze them past the cars in the driveway.

Read the rest of this entry »

Photos of another lawn conversion. Olive trees, Lavender, Grevillea, Manzanita, Westringia, succulents, California version of a mediterranean palette.

The photo above is in the fourth year.

Read the rest of this entry »

I took a winter trip to Costa Rica. It felt good to be out of the country at the start of this presidency. I’d feel better if I were there now.

Read the rest of this entry »

On my trip I got to see the home museums of all three of Scandinavia’s prominent twentieth-century sculptors, Karl Milles from Sweden, Vigeland from Norway, and Rudolph Tegner from Denmark. Tegner was my least favorite, he’s a clear step down from Milles and Vigeland, but the museum is set in a beautiful moorland that makes it worth visiting.

The museum is a brutalist concrete building with a huge skylight and no windows. It mostly houses plaster models of his sculptures. They’re not great and I didn’t spend a lot of time inside. But the museum is in a beautiful moorland with grazing sheep and fourteen bronzes. The sculptures aren’t really sited all that well, but the heather is beautiful enough to make it work.

I feel like he just dragged his sculptures out into the moorland rather than designing sculpture and space to fit together the way Milles did. The one above was clearly designed to be in front of a wall, and the one below is diminished by the scale of the space.

This one has a charming sentimentality. The rest I found pretty stiff.

This is the other one I found interesting, combining an abstract timber horse with a more figurative human. It’s too bad he didn’t do more like it.

But I give him credit for appreciating the moorland. It’s lovely.