I'm not usually an advocate of shortcuts or 'instant' anything, but this is just too fun not to share. A wonderful group of folks get together every month and trade ideas about making tray landscapes - everything from Hon Non Bo, Saikei, Succulent Art, trough gardens, topiary, anything that grows in a pot or represents a living landscape. At the last meeting a talented artist, Nancy Reisman, brought to everyone's attention her recent discovery - Home Depot is selling 4" pots of Meyer's Asparagus Fern (Asparagus meyeri) for $3.47 and when trimmed and incorporated next to a rock or landscape feature they look for all the world like Italian Cypress, with no additional work and coming in at about 3 - 6" tall in little groupings, the similarity is uncanny... so I raced over to HD and bought a few...

Before:

After about 20 minutes:

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Embarrassingly I will admit I'm still putting together that promised posting of more of Jim Mueller's work, but in the meantime he sent me a most inspiring photo:



I asked him for more information about how he did this and he responded:

"As you might imagine, the process of creating the mountain compositions for my tray landscapes generates a fair amount of stone fragments. In the spirit of resource conservation, I've tried using them to build cairns like this one. The larger stones are held together with hydraulic cement, and smaller ones with silicone aquarium sealant. Happily, the resulting compositions have lots of cracks and internal voids that act as sounding chambers for the falling water. With a little tuning, they can be very musical instruments.To stabilize the stones and maintain the composition while transporting,cleaning, and repotting, I often glue them to a deep blue or green Corian base (salvaged from a neighbor's kitchen countertop business) shaped to fit the bottom of the container.

"I make my cranes with very long legs, so that they can be set deeply into soil, moss, or holes drilled in the rock, as the one in the photo. I was as pleased as you with the effect of this photo. It was taken last Friday at sunrise over Seneca Lake, the largest of the finger lakes in upstate New York. As you can see, it's an inspiring place. I've gathered mosses there,along with lots of ideas for sculptures like this one."

Thanks so much Jim! Here's a preview of that next installment...


And finally, an apology to the email subscribers - the last email was very confusing because the new video was not part of the email, and I made it worse by putting a link to the old video, so please click here to see the New Video (Saikei Made Easy) - Thank you for understanding.