I watched with great interest a BBC documentary about The Glasgow Boys the other night. I have only just recently enjoyed their exhibition at the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, which incidentally was the best selling visual-arts exhibition of all time, and I have long been a fan, particularly of Arthur Melvilles work, since studying Art at school and college. These guys were real pioneers in their field and drew inspiration, as all good artists should, from their own heroes as well as intently from their subject matters.
In one scene, not quite surprised to see Muriel Gray roaming the countryside, I was more taken aback by the introduction of her interviewee, Jack Frame, and his striking and atmospheric renditions of trees in their countryside settings.
This example, of a solitary cherry blossom at the ripening of it’s bloom, is a scene I often try to replicate in my designs. There is nothing quite as exciting, for me as a designer, to see one of my completed gardens be confetti strewn by a celebratory blossom tree as it heralds in the warmer weather of a summer.
Originally posted 2010-11-18 09:03:47. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
One of my very favourite garden designers is Diarmuid Gavin – his ability to think beyond the normal contexts of traditional gardens is what made me want to become a garden designer. The summer house in this design is fantastic and it makes an otherwise simple garden seem very special!
Originally posted 2009-10-12 19:06:03. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
I studied this poem at school and remember enjoying it immensely then. It was recalled to my memory after watching last night’s The Culture Show on BBC2, and a piece on the fantastic project World Book Night, which has listed Seamus Heaney’s “New Selected Poems 1966-1987″ as one of the 25 books involved.
I love the imagery and the memories it evokes as a child watching my own father in the garden:
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
You get a good buzz from finding a new shop or website or TV show or film that ticks all your boxes. In terms of garden inspiration and quirky ideas, Flora Grubb Gardens ticks our boxes! It’s thousands of miles from sunny Glasgow but can still be admired through these fantastic images from the Danger Garden blog. Check it out:
If you have one, I know you love your shed. You might not think it, know it or say it…but deep down you really cannot do without it! Yours may be a handsome new shed, still proud in its newly treated timber – it reminds you of log cabins and Swedish saunas and you treat it like a grown-up Wendy house…sort of! It might be a dilapidated old shack, creaking with character and woodlice – you run a gauntlet of HUGE spiders and webs to get the rusty old garden shears every summer, cursing as some old tin of paint or a lawnmower blade whacks you shin on the way past! Either way, you love it. You might think, know or say you hate it – but you don’t. (more…)
Originally posted 2009-10-02 10:17:44. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Introducing our newest blogging author Matthew Thomson; also a trainee garden designer and a landscaper, whose recent experience at an introductory meeting with the Glasgow Guerilla Gardeners has indeed left him inspired and keen to spread the good word.
Some more exciting inspiration from Studio G – this time an article on the work of Brendan Moar…I love this tunnel idea. Fantastic work:
If you have one, I know you love your shed. You might not think it, know it or say it…but deep down you really cannot do without it! Yours may be a handsome new shed, still proud in its newly treated timber – it reminds you of log cabins and Swedish saunas and you treat it like a grown-up Wendy house…sort of! It might be a dilapidated old shack, creaking with character and woodlice – you run a gauntlet of HUGE spiders and webs to get the rusty old garden shears every summer, cursing as some old tin of paint or a lawnmower blade whacks you shin on the way past! Either way, you love it. You might think, know or say you hate it – but you don’t. 
