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Nectaroscordum sculpture

Who can figure where artists will find inspiration? One found found a very, very marginal shot of a canna flower I grabbed one day and turned it in to this glorious quilt.

I just got an email from Iris Sebba, a 3D art student in England, who says the image below inspired her to try to render it in metal and felt.

nectaroscordum opening

It’s not one of my best images. (There are better Nectaroscordum images in this post a couple of weeks later.) But I’m honored that Iris saw this image and then spent hours and hours and hours creating this sculpture.

nectaroscordum sculpture

nectaroscordum sculpture

nectaroscordum sculpture

nectaroscordum sculpture

I wish I could point you to Iris’s website, but all she has for now is a Facebook page. She writes:

[I have] no other images on the web except me in welding gear on facebook. Art is a slow process and really want to enjoy it rather than be pressurised by market forces (that is if anyone would be have the slightest interest in buying anyway!!) so hence no publicity. Having said that my family and friends may well find they have large metallic donations in the future. My husband is already set in fibreglass in the garden (not literally). I have done the degree for intellectual satisfaction as well as practical skills and may go on to do an MA.

Oh Iris. If only you were closer I would drive to pick up any donations you cared to make to my humble garden.

Here’s the fiberglass sculpture of Iris’s husband. Creepy or cool? I vote the latter.

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A sucker for old pictures

When I’m tired of reading, I like to peruse image-laden sites, including:

Vintagraph is heavy on WWI, WPA and WWII posters. Some have gardening themes:

Pooster via vintagraph

The same folks (I think) also put out Shorpy, which features mostly black and white photos, mostly Civil War to ’50s, mostly from the Library of Congress, like the one below from the USDA amaryllis show in 1927. (Garden-related photos are few and far between, but I like this tilt-shifty girl with a crow, this opera singer with greenhouse cukes and hoeing beets.)

amaryllis show via Shorpy

Studio g is a relatively recent discovery for me. Anyone into design will find something to like here. The picture below of an early school garden isn’t typical of Rocelle’s content, which more closely resembles Garden Design than Shorpy. I’m just a sucker for old pictures.

old school garden

If you want really old stuff, check out the ‘Visual Materia Obscura‘ and more at BiblioOdyssey. Again, the topics are a wide-ranging blend, focusing mostly on science, history and eclectic bookart. But if you want to go right to the good stuff, visit the posts helpfully tagged flora. Below is Ornithogolum fibriatum from a post about illustrations from a series of early 19th century botanical monographs.

Ornithogolum fibriatum

octopus topiaryBut my favorite eye candy is still to be found at Delphine’s ParadisExpresss. My French is no longer strong enough to translate the words. But who needs to when there’s this much to look at.

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‘Yellow Is the New Green’

Wherein I find support for peeing on the compost pile in this morning’s NYTimes OpEd section.

Urine might be one way forward. Before engineers scoff into their breakfast, consider that since at least 135,000 urine-diversion toilets are in use in Sweden and that a Swiss aquatic institute did a six-year study of urine separation that found in its favor. In Sweden, some of the collected urine — which contains 80 percent of the nutrients in excrement — is given to farmers, with little objection. “If they can use urine and it’s cheap, they’ll use it,” said Petter Jenssen, a professor at the Agricultural University of Norway.

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