Earth Sculpture, Floriade

Earth Sculptures at Floriade - Art meets Horticulture

This panorama was shot in one of the exhibition gardens at Floriade-2012 the decennial global horticulture expo.

Floriade-2012 was held near Venlo in the province of Limburg in the South East of The Netherlands.

The original Floriade international gardening festival was held in Rotterdam in 1960. Each decade since then the gardeners of the world have been invited to a different location in The Netherlands for a global horticulture festival. The second one was in 1972 and they have been held every ten years from then.

In this garden horticulture meets art thanks to the work of artist Sjer Jacobs who designed the garden and the earth sculptures that it freatures. He chose the painting “Lying around the water” as his inspiration and created a garden that reflected the painting.

The metal disc with the blue flowers growing through it represents a pond. There are three great heads crafted out of soil and potting compost, representing giants “Lying around the water”.

Moss and seedlings were planted in the heads to hold them together. The intention was that they would change and grow throughout the year of Floriade.

In an interview before Floriade opened Sjer Jacobs said: “It is a living piece of art created with nature. I’m fond of gardens and I often see gardens to which an art work is added in some way. Some works or art are just bought and some might be especially made for the garden. But for Floriade I didn’t want to make a garden with artworks in it, I wanted the art and nature to be as one.”

He also created the benches and the other figures and sculptures in the garden.

There is some explanation of his inspiration and his methods on his website. Obviously most of it is in Dutch, but, if you have selected the English-language option, the captions to the images mostly include an English sentence or two.

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Europe / Netherlands

Lat: 51° 24' 26.28" N
Long: 6° 7' 7.39" E

Elevation: 20m

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Medium. Nearby, but not to the last decimal.

Equipment: The source images were taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mk II, Zenitar 16mm fisheye f/2.8 lens. The camera was hand held using a string tied around the pivotal point of the lens, with a small weight dangling to the ground, as a guide to position.

Horizontal photographs were taken at roughly 45° angles and also two ground shots and a sky shot. Each "shot" consisted of three bracketed exposures from +2 to -2 stops.

A total of 33 separate images were combined using Hugin in order to achieve this High Dynamic Range type result.