Power plants
Enhancing art and sculpture with plantings, the atlanta Botanical Garden is a stunning showcase of mosaiculture.
DAYS before the exhibition opened at the Atlanta Botanical Garden in Midtown Atlanta in the US state of Georgia, excited guests moved about the 12ha garden trying to discover each of the fanciful creations. No one seemed deterred from the task when facing the unfinished, headless giant cobra or by the workers standing atop the dreamy noggin of the 7.6m-tall Earth Goddess, preparing for a crane to hoist her final sections into place.
A gaggle of Red Hat Society ladies whipped out tiny digital cameras and cellphones to click images of a shaggy ogre who looked like an escapee from Shrek. Down the sidewalk, schoolkids jumped for joy as they came upon a pair of dancing fish that spouted water while spinning circles in Howell Fountain.
“Whoa!” they shouted, as if they’d uncovered the world’s largest Chia Pets. “Awesome!” Mary Pat Matheson smiled sunnily. The garden’s president and CEO for nearly a decade has cultivated the idea of the city’s Midtown green spot as an “outdoor museum”, a prime setting for exhibitions and other cultural programming.
She seeded that notion with a 2004 show of Dale Chihuly glass sculptures that attracted 425,000 visitors in eight months, beginning a string of strong-drawing, warm-weather exhibits amid the pristine plantings. And last winter, a season when the garden used to ease into a hibernation interrupted by few visitors, it drew 168,000 in its second year of the holiday light show Garden Lights, Holiday Nights.
So Matheson was on it when tipped by a Canadian colleague a couple of years ago that International Mosaiculture of Montreal, a nonprofit group that has staged sprawling competitions around the world in this curious art and science, was interested in creating exhibitions scaled for smaller sites such as the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
“I said, ‘I want first dibs, I want to be the first to do this exhibition,’” Matheson recalled. “We’ve never done a summer exhibit that’s plant-centric, so this is particularly exciting to us, to show how you can take art and sculpture and enhance it with plantings.” Thus, the Midtown attraction beside Piedmont Park will host the first major mosaiculture show in the United States.
Even though few in these parts know what mosaiculture is exactly. And even though Matheson and her development staff had to raise US$2mil (RM6mil), easily the garden’s biggest exhibit budget to date.
But then everything about Imaginary Worlds: Plants Larger Than Life is big.
The sculptures – 19 of them, festooned with 118,000 living plants – were transported by 15 refrigerated trucks during a 20-hour drive from Montreal (Canada) to Atlanta. Earth Goddess alone commanded four tractor-trailers.
Also along for the ride, in addition to the makings of the cobras and ogre, were sections for six rabbits, two butterflies, a unicorn, a dog and a trio of rotund berries on skinny legs that look like they might be kin to those singing California raisins.
Each is made up of carefully pruned annuals planted into soil-and-sphagnum moss-filled netting that blankets the steel forms. Different types of plants are juxtaposed to create texture and patterns that define the look of each creation. For instance, Earth Goddess consists of more than 40,000 plants, including potato vine, sedum, fan flower, lantana, Joseph’s coat and petunias.
Built-in irrigation systems are hidden inside it and other large pieces, keeping them watered daily. Smaller ones simply have to be sprayed with a hose.
The roots of modern mosaiculture extend to 16th-century Europe, where wealthy landowners commissioned elaborate three-dimensional gardens or “embroidery beds”. The art later evolved into more sculptural and three-dimensional forms.
The term mosaiculture was first employed in France in the 1860s.
Matheson said strong word of mouth will determine the show’s success, pointing out that Montreal Botanical Garden drew 700,000 in 2000 for the first mosaiculture competition on the power of such buzz.
“You can look at that and say it’s one of those magnetic exhibits,” she said.
Even if Imaginary Worlds scores an overwhelming success, it won’t be extended. By the end of the six-month run in October, the annuals will be getting played out.
But the Earth Goddess will remain at the edge of the Cascades Garden, where water streams out of her palm into the pool below, for several more years. (Matheson doesn’t like to call anything in the garden “permanent”.) Earth Goddess, which the garden bought, will be replanted next spring, and Matheson hopes she will become an icon at the attraction. But before that she’ll be transformed into the Ice Queen for the next edition of Garden Lights, Holiday Nights. – The Atlanta JournalConstitution/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services For more information on
which ends in October, go to www.atlantabotanicalgarden.org.