One of our projects comes out of Mike’s renovation of his garden, making a Sacred Garden. This is a long term project and another aspect of landscape. It helps that Mike’s view is an aging small park next to a country house which was designed by Capability Brown, the ultimate in managed man-made landscape famous the world over. However, it is the connection with form and rock and water in the garden as the basis of planting which brings it all alive. Arguably, the form and rock even the Neolithic British Isles peoples were intrigued by in their construction of stone circles.
Mike, an experienced gardener, has with Lance’s help, brought water into the garden. One way has been with a water feature with bog garden. The water feature is made from recycled items such as waste bins and even copper pans from Bangladesh. Recycling takes a lot of doing, and of course a bit of bodging as its a prototype.
The recycled chromed ball has water pumping over it and represents the watery planet Earth. The circular round lawn is the sun and each is based roughly on the actual proportions of the sun relative to the Earth. The relative distance is not of course possible to fit into the garden. But this plays into our exploration of the Earth-Sun relationship and stone circles. Inevitably the moon needed to be added, so Mike included in the water feature a moon floating above the watery earth which lights at night. Mike made the porcelain moon the same relative size as the watery reflective Earth ball. Of course again it was not practical to put the moon at the actual distance it orbits the Earth.
The Capability Brown view is now only framed by Lebanese cedars, the once present tree line of ash and elm gone with the modern imported pests associated with global warming and massive modern global trade and transportation. However, at Winter Solstice the sun rises behind the water feature, and this year during the Summer Solstice the strawberry moon rose behind the water feature and took its lowest orbit across the tree and bush line horizon.
The colour of the porcelain is nicely white during the day as a full moon and with the light through it at night it is a warm colour just like the strawberry moon.
wow!! 102Glaze from Rocks