Showing posts with label Botanic Gardens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Botanic Gardens. Show all posts

Sunday 8 July 2018

Botanic Gardens - down by the lily pond

I'm still very slowly working my way through the photos from Zakynthos - I probably won't get very far till the weather cools down a little. But last Sunday we went to the Botanic Gardens in the morning, and editing some of those photos was a more manageable task. They have changed the parking fee from a flat rate to an hourly one, so we were determined to make it out under the 2 hour mark.

This set of photos is all from around the lily ponds - in full bloom and full of dragonflies, hawkers and darters.











Wednesday 24 May 2017

Irises

Last Saturday wasn't a gloriously blue-sky sunny day, but it was nice enough for us to take a short trip to the Botanic Gardens - and we got back to the car park just as the rain started.

Here are some of the irises. They're a flower I love, we used have the big tall ones in the garden when I was a child, and for quite a number of years I had a tub full of small orchid irises  I had grown from seed - but in the end they stopped flowering and their pot cracked in the frost last winter so I threw them out and will start again some time.







So for my Art Neko card this week, no surprise that I chose to feature an iris, using a stamp from the Set of 9 Flowered ATCs.
I stamped and embossed it on watercolour paper and coloured it with Inktense pencils and distress re-inkers for the background. The layer behind it was done with watercolour pencils sanded over some watercolour paper which had a stencil laid over it and then I misted a small section at a time and sanded the pencils over it. I had thought a while back of giving away my older cheap watercolour pencils, but this is a technique I like for the soft granular textured look it gives, so I held onto them. The base was just coloured with distress ink and misted, then scored around the edges. Since the ATC image has a heavy black outline, I added black edges to my sanded watercolour panel and the base layer. Oh - and because I liked the look of the paper where there had been no stencil and it just caught all the sanded pencil, I used a strip of that along the bottom, just for fun.


Wednesday 8 June 2016

Garden Sunshine 2

And the rest of the photos from the Botanic Gardens.




I loved the scarring on this succulent leaf. Even the little line at the right looks like stitches.



Echium webbi (Boraginaceae)





Tuesday 7 June 2016

Garden Sunshine

Monday was, in fact, the least sunny day of our holiday weekend...but it was still lovely enough that we took a trip to the Botanic Gardens, our first of the year.

Some photos now, more to follow tomorrow.












Sunday 4 October 2015

Botanic Gardens ~ Sculpture (2)

There were several of these vivid red lily pads floating at one end of the lily ponds, each with its little nymph.


Also floating on the pond (and some had tipped over and weren't floating at all) were some cute little ducklings - just the sort you'd have in a bath!




This was one of my favourite exhibits - the title was something like "Live Streaming Nature". There were two comfortable leather chairs set under a tree, with the lily pond framed by an empty television set. The "room" was furnished with a carpet and accessories, and even some "home decor" attached to a couple of the trees.






The sunlight made it almost impossible to get a good picture of this lovely bird and his collection of junk - I took several and these are the best.



Another indoor exhibit - this was a fun one because the fish is articulated; at one end of the base there was a wheel which you could turn, and as you did, the fish and the ribs in the frame moved, as if the fish was wriggling.


Saturday 3 October 2015

Botanic Gardens ~ Sculpture

I'm so glad we went to the Botanic Gardens last week and didn't leave it till this weekend. After a week of beautiful sunshine we woke to a dull grey morning - and this time it wasn't just a mist which burnt off as the sun rose. Revisiting the sculptures as I edited some photos was good enough for today.

Some here, more to follow tomorrow.

This was C's favourite of the indoor exhibits; pyrography and colouring.

These flowers were in the main entrance to the Curvilinear greenhouse; made from recycled metal, beautifully textured as if they had been corrugated.



This might be the first year that we didn't buy a catalogue, so I can only remember a few exhibit titles. This one was easy to remember - Flotsam and Jetsam.



In the grass garden, a flock of birds...



From the back, I had thought that these were cracked eggshells, because we could see the birds in the background beyond them. But once we walked into the grasses, we could see that they were flowers.