I Could Do This! Copper Pavers and Silver Orbs in the Pond

Inspired by two other installations at the Chatsworth exhibit/sale for the uber rich...

Copper pavers: I couldn't afford solid copper but I'm thinking a piece of copper sheeting over standard concrete pavers? Stainless steel or Cor-ten would also be nice; the liquid adhesives designed for concrete should work well to make the attachment. Great for the paths in the newly installed (but still unfinished!) potager.

Silver orbs in the pond: these are hand-polished stainless steel (hollow, obviously). Given that similar orbs (machine-polished) are readily available from on-line purveyors (google 'silver garden globes'), I wonder at bit at its inclusion in the auction...I suppose the placement of the orbs counts as the art? Still, lovely for a party and I think I can rely on my own artistry to place them in the garden pond-that-used-to-be-a-buffalo-wallow, now brim-full with early fall rains.

The original works are 'Narcissus Garden' by Yayoi Kusama and 'Cuprux' by Carl Andre.

UPDATE: Reader Jamie has sent a helpful comment to this post, which I've added below...the information on the aural and interactive qualities of the installation is especially enlightening. Thanks, Jamie!

"Yayoi Kusama did an installation of thousands of those silvery balls floating on the good-sized indoor lake within the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia a few years ago.

As well as being lovely to look at, they made the most pleasant, deepish-hollow sound as they gently knocked together. And, best of all, all the children visiting had wonderful fun pushing the balls around. The Queensland gallery tries very hard to make itself as child-friendly as possible and allows kids the chance to touch things when it won't do any harm. It was a delightful scene.

We bought one of the balls while at the gallery and it sits in a stainless steel bowl filled with water in our garden, still in very good condition after all these years. Every time I see our little silver ball I think of that charming installation."

Garden History Image of the Week: New view of Chatsworth

Joseph Paxton's 1844 'Emperor' Fountain at Chatsworth as seen by '225.5º ARC X 5' by Bernar Venet. Part of "Beyond Limits", a Sotheby's selling exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture currently installed on the grounds. Get your bid in by November 15, if you're so inclined.

The Emperor fountain, with a maximum height of 296 feet, is entirely ego-powered, having been commissioned by the Duke of Devonshire in 1843 to surpass the fountains of Peterhof in anticipation of the impending visit of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. The work, including digging an eight-acre reservoir 110 meters above the house to supply the water under gravity-pressure, proceeded even at night under the light of flares and the project was completed in just six months. Alas, the Tsar never came.

But the water pressure was used to provide Chatsworth's electricity from 1893 to 1936, and after the installation of a new turbine in 1988 currently produces about a third of house's daily requirements; a thoroughly modern use of what was once just a garden fancy. I'm wondering if any other gardens have put their historic hydraulics to such a use...if you know of one, get in touch!

Arne Quinze's Cityscape, Brussels, 2008

Thanks to reader p.Ol Ghekiere for pointing out that the pavilion previously featured in the posting on nests was not in fact in Berlin, but in Brussels; a work by the Belgian artist Arne Quinze.

The temporary installation, entitled Cityscape, stood for a year (2008) in Brussels' luxury district, before it was dismantled and the wood recycled.

According to the artist, Arne Quinze: 'CITYSCAPE resembles a frozen movement; speed caught in time...If you look at it from a distance, pure movement seems to keep the volatile structure in the air. Sunrays play with the wooden beams; a game of light and shade creates ever-changing patterns. Its immense size - 40 meter long and 25 meter wide - absorbs you. "

Fascinating views of the nest-like construction process are from the artists' website.

Garden History Image of the Week...Le Jardin Japonais

To add to the previously posted history of Japanese dish gardens, this lovely image by Icart published in the French magazine L'Illustration in 1932.

El Jardin Borda, Cuernavaca, Mexico, c. 1908

An excerpt from Viva Mexico!, by Charles Macomb Flandrau, 1908:

"Early in the eighteenth century there went to Mexico from France a boy of sixteen named Joseph de la Borde. By his fortunate mining venture at Tlalpujahua, Tasco, and Zacatecas...he made a fortune of forty million pesos. One of these millions he spent in building a church at Tasco, and another he spent in building a garden at Cuernavaca."

"It lies on a steep hillside behind Cuernavaca, and even it it were not one of the most beautiful of tangled, neglected, ruined old gardens anywhere, it would be lovable for the manner in which it tried so hard to be a French garden and failed. Joseph, it is clear, had the French passion for formalizing the landscape--for putting Nature into a pretty strait-jacket; but although he spent much time and a million pesos in trying to do this at Cuernavaca, he rather wonderfully did not succeed."

"The situation, the flora...the walls, the fountains, the summerhouses, the cascades, and the ponds...all combine to give the place an individuality, sometimes Spanish, sometimes Mexican, but French only in a...remote manner..."

"It hangs precipitously on the side of a ravine when it should have been level (one is so glad it is not), and the dense, southern trees--mangoes and sapotes and Indian laurel--with which it was planted, have long since outgrown the scale of the place, interlaced and roofed out the sky overhead with an opaque and somber canopy...In its impermeable shade there are long, islanded tanks in which many numerous families of ducks and geese live a strangely secluded, dignified, aristocratic existence--arbors of roses and jasmine, and heavy, broken old fountains that no longer play and splash."

"In seventy-five or a hundred years there will be many fine old formal gardens in the United States--finer than the Borda ever was. Under the pergolas of some of them there is much tea and pleasant conversation and one greatly admires their marble furniture imported from Italy--their careful riot of flowers. But at present it is difficult to forget that their prevailing color is wealth, and to forget it will take at least another century. If they have everything that Joseph's garden lacks, they all lack the thing it has. For in its twilit arbors and all along its sad and silent terraces there is at any hour the same poetic mystery...[of the] Borghese garden in Rome. The Borghese is extensive and the Borda is tiny, but history has strolled in them both and they both seem to have beautiful, secret sorrows."

El Jardin Borda, used by the Emporer Maximilian as a summer home during his short and ridiculous reign in the 1860s, once hosted Austrian, French, and Mexican nobility who went rowing in the moonlight on its artificial lake.

Now taken over by the state and used as an outdoor theatre and market, a 1987 renovation seems to have vanquished the overgrown atmosphere that captivated Charles Macomb Flandrau.

Flandrau was a wealthy and well-traveled eldest son of fine family, an acquaintance of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a celebrity already by age 26 for his Harvard Episodes (detailing the escapades of privileged young men such as himself within the ivied walls) before he went south to visit his brother's coffee plantation and write Viva Mexico. His mention of American formal gardens having the 'color of wealth' is undoubtedly a reference to the Italianate landscapes being created up and down the East Coast by the noveau riche of the American Country House era, with whom he was well acquainted.

A series of 1904 photographs by C.B. Waite in the Rene D`Harnoncourt Photograph Collection at the University of Texas captures the Mexico Flandrau writes of, though unfortunately at low resolution, including the two small photos of the Borda garden as was, below.