the end of Spring and start of Summer

from my garden:

Hooray for spring!

the latest lot of photos from the garden...

Pop-Up Parklets

A kind of urban intervention, 'parklets' have been popping up in cities around the world, including Sao Paulo, Vancouver, Copenhagen, San Francisco and Dublin. Taking over parking spaces normally reserved for cars, these temporary, pedestrian friendly little patches of garden make a point about the amount of green space disappearing under tarmac.

wabi kusa, kokedama, kusamono, ikebana.

Everyone knows about bonsai (especially if you've watched the karate kid film) but I wanted to look at these other approaches to greenery that originated in Japan.
Firstly: Kusamono. This translates as 'grass thing' and is an arrangement of growing plants replicating a little slice of nature.

When I saw pictures of Rosetta Sarah Elkin's 'Tiny Taxonomies' they reminded me of this. She created little fragments of landscape in the tops of steel tubes, reflecting the local surroundings. Each one is like a little garden. She recreates it in different locations, using plants from the surroundings. For example her London version used plants and materials from Highgate Cemetery. 

Next is Kokedama or string gardens:

Wabi kusa is a more random arrangement, where plants are wrapped onto balls of earth, sat in water and left to sprout. It reminds me a bit of the heads you made out of tights as a kid with grass sprouting out of them for hair.

And lastly there's the art of flower arranging, Japanese style: Ikebana.

minimal & elegant.

Gardens on wheels

Moving Forest: 100 trees planted in shopping trolleys creating a forest on the streets of Amsterdam by NL. Inspired by a fairytale about a forest that moves at night so children trapped inside can never find their way out, the idea was to give the trees away so they could roam around the city, finding new and maybe surprising homes.

Food Systems Planning in Berlin had a community-gardening orientated take on the shopping trolley garden, collecting abandoned trolleys and holding workshops for people to create their own mobile gardens.

http://www.foodsystemsplanning.com/gemuesekorb

Tiny Gardens

How small can a garden be and still be called a garden?

Is this a garden?:

Pete Dungeys pothole gardens

How about these?:

top to bottom:

 Coleen Jordan

Erica Wiener

Unknown

Elna and Ei

Adorn Jewellery