Guilfoyle's Volcano

A long dormant reservoir, constructed in 1876 to store water for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne now forms the focal point of an inspiring new landscape design. The design of the crater-like reservoir was originally undertaken by William Guilfoyle, as a method of irrigating the gardens through a gravity fed system along with the vision of providing a landmark landscape folly for the gardens.

After being hidden from the public for over sixty years, the reservoir has now been resurrected by Landscape Architect, Andrew Laidlaw, as the dramatic centre piece of volcano-themed garden. Rocks and red lava erupt from the crater, created by a mixture of broken terracotta tiles and fluid concrete shapes. The steep sides of the volcano are planted with a unique botanic collection of succulents and cacti species. Within the crater itself are several floating circular islands, which naturally move about the water-filled crater in the breeze. These islands are planted with native and indigenous species to form water filtration systems - an innovative and intriguing idea, which is dissapointingly more successful on functional rather than aesthetic levels.

Guilfoyle's Volcano is dramatic, powerful and symbolically playful - a unique contemporary landscape design with echoes of the original historical concepts envisaged for the landscape at the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Photo taken onsite.

A message in a bottle

These beautiful living sculptures are the creation of Paula Hayes a New York artist / Landscape designer who creates terrariums within delicate glass vessels. They remind me of specimen jars for rare plants or test tubes where young seedlings might be nurtured into a blossoming life. I'm especially fond of the oversize pendulous terrariums in the image above, where layers of soil and other growing media can be clearly seen by the viewer like a section through the landscape. Not only are these terrariums a living artwork, but they are also an intriguing way of transporting landscapes (although small in size only) to where ever we might want them to be - indoors, inside a courtyard or in a spare nook somewhere. Beautiful and fragile miniature landscapes can be nurtured and appreciated even in a seemingly inhospitable location.

The image above is from Paula Hayes' exhibition 'Excepts from the Story of Planet Thear' at the Marlanne Boesky Gallery, New York.

Blue Sticks

Following the garden festival theme of my last post: the Blue Stick Garden (Jardin de Batons Bleus) designed by Claude Cormier is intriguing and joyously simple (something which I believe is extremely challenging to 'design'). Blue Sticks was exhibited at the Jardin de Metis International Garden Festival in Quebec in 2000.

I find it refreshing to view designs, such as Blue Sticks, which approach the creation of landscapes from a different perspective. After time spent focusing on the nuances of planting designs and configurations it is uplifting to be presented with a landscape where plant species are not physically dominant, but where they inform the design expression. Blue Sticks evolved as a concept directly related to its site of exhibtion at the Jardin de Metis. The initial concept for the installation arose from the blue poppies adapted to the site's microclimate and featured extensively in the heritage mixed flower borders at the Jardin de Metis. It is wonderful to see a design in direct relation to the site itself - too many modern landscape designs seem to be shallow layered concepts that have no connection with the site they occupy or with the broader urban fabric they are a part of.

What intrigued me most about Blue Sticks however, was the simple visual trick employed by painting the long sticks blue on three sides, leaving one remaining side to be painted a vivid contrasting orange. To vistors surpise, the labyrinth-like layout of the design revealed this dramatic colour change only once they had turned around to view the path they had just walked through the garden. This chameleon-like transformation is deliciously simple and uncomplicated. It is this simplicity (almost child-like in its effortlessness) that is something we need to see alot more of in contemporay (usually over-complex) landscapes.