Ginkgo avenue in Japanese Meiji Shrine garden

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This brilliant photograph, by Masahiro Hayata, combines the spiritual glory of a gothic vault with the transcendent luminance of a stained glass window.

The avenue is formed with the oldest surviving tree species on earth, the only survivor from prehistoric times. The Ginkgo was widespread 270 million years ago but disappeared – except from a small area in Central China. The seed was taken to Europe, from a Japanese temple garden, by Engelbert Kaempfer in 1692. Kaempfer  was a German naturalist, traveller and physician who wrote an important account of Japan and also made the first accurate drawings of Persian gardens.

The 300m Ginkgo Avenue is in the garden of the Meiji Jingu (shrine) in Tokyo. It commemorates the 1867 Meiji Restoration, which led directly to the astonishing modernization of Japan: the landscape architecture of this photograph involves many interests.

rural graffiti

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and graffiti doesnt have to be urban










( i got these images from pic-tures blogspot, but cant seem to find it any more to add the link. i keep getting redirected to this taiwanese blog! anyway, i’ll put up more images if anyone wants to see them )

Graffiti in Berlin park design

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Berlin has more of a graffiti ‘problem’ than London. So much of the city is so dull that local artists are taking the problem into their own hands. But look at this: Sudgelande Natur Park, along with many other intelligent uses of public art, has let local artists adorn the ugly hunks of concrete left by engineers and architects. [Images courtesy Olivier Six and Jens Uwe Liepelt]

We are grateful to Grün Berlin for the recently uploaded photographs of Sudgelande are also pleased to have a Head Gardener’s Comment. We look forward to having Visitor Comments and  Head Gardener’s comments throughout our Garden Finder Section. It had details of 2,440 gardens on 10th December and has 2,442 places on 11th December. New entries are always welcome and we worry that some countries (eg Israel) are seriously under-represented.

Cornwall gardens, hotels and tours

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Cornwall Gardens and Recommended Garden Hotels eBook

Cornwall Gardens and Recommended Garden Hotels eBook

Only 12 days until the winter solstice: its time to be thinking about next year’s garden tours!

While planning a Cornwall garden tour, we produced an eBook on the subject. It is available for free download from our Gardens in Cornwall page. If any readers have further suggestions on where to go and which hotels have good gardens, please add a comment below! We would be pleased to include the information in a revised edition of the Cornwall Gardens eBook.

The eBook has information on eight top Cornwall Gardens – and also John Claudius London’s notes on his 1842 Cornwall Garden Tour. He was very ill and only spent a few days in the Duchy but his remarks are of considerable historic interest. Loudon was the most prolific garden writer who ever lived and perhaps the only polymath to take on the subject.

See also: Garden Tours in Cornwall.


Graffiti in the garden

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Kelburn Castle. Images by flickr user guinavere.

Kelburn Castle. Images by flickr user guinavere.


My local council detests graffiti artists. A rapid response team in CBRN Suits (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) soon arrives with tanks of noxious chemicals. Understandably, allowing citizens to paint wherever they wish without permission is an unworkable situation and definitely not one I am going to argue for.

However, sometimes I feel too little thought is put into whether the environment has actually been improved with the odd dash of new paint here and there. So, I was delighted to find a more-enlightened attitude on the Glasgow Riviera. Kelburn Castle has been in our Garden Finder for ages, without being on many people’s must-see garden lists for Scotland. Then they employed Brazilian Graffiti artists for a paint job. Now it’s a real spectacle. On cold winter days Kelburn blazes on the landscape as though on fire.

Is it Art? Or should someone call the CBRN guys as soon as possible? Peronally, I love it.


Bauhaus Design Principles

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Why did the Bauhuas succeed in Weimar and Dessau, while the New Bauhaus,  founded in Chicago in 1937 (which became Illinois Institute of Design) did not succeed? Laszlo Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus. A painter, photographer, filmmaker and teacher, he saw the artist as a visionary and said: “We need Utopians of genius to foreshadow the existence of the man of the future, who, in the instinctive and simple, as well as in the complicated relationships of his life, will work in harmony with the basic laws of his being.” [http://nmaa-ryder.si.edu/collections/exhibits/abstraction/moholyNagy.html] In his book Vision in Motion Moholy wrote that ‘art’ is the result of an inner drive. However, he qualified the usefulness of this inner drive by saying “only by translating an intuitive grasp of the unadulterated problems of his time into imagery, can a coherent expression be ‘best’.” 

Although the curriculum at the New Bauhaus was reputed to be the same as the basic or founding course developed by Walter Gropius for the Bauhaus in Germany, the Bauhaus in Chicago never reached the same heights of design innovation. The Chicago Bauhaus is recognised today for advancing the art of photography. In terms of design, the School is credited with changing the stylistic direction, resulting in a reduction in the then dominant ‘Beaux Arts’ tradition in America.  [http://www.bauhaus.de/english/bauhaus1919/nachfolge1919.htm]

Modernism, in one sense,  became America’s post-war style. Designers in the UK and Australia looked to the United States for the new direction. Perhaps this is the legacy of the Bauhaus? Yet, one of IIT’s (the New Bauhaus) famous sons is Charles Owen. He is known for the customer-centric process called ‘Structured Planning’:  “Structured Planning is a methodology that generates and optimises the insights and information necessary for planning customer-centric service systems, and has the added advantage of enabling traceability of decision-making, a feature that is particularly relevant in an accountability-focused government environment.” Owen’s philosophy of the customer-centric process is clearly different (if not in opposition to) the idea of the crafts-based artist expressing an inner drive which is representative of his historical time. Or is it so different?

The diagram (http://flickr.com/photos/21525853@N00/2291690514/ ) is from the 1939 brochure of the New Bauhaus School of Design. It has Architecture and Engineering at its heart and Nature Study near the periphery. Garden design and landscape architecture do not appear on the diagram.