Lightscapes, Melbourne Botanic Gardens 2024

 

Last week we were dazzled by Lightscape at the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.  The 2.2km illuminated trail around the gardens was filled with wonder and magic.  Themes included Indigenous culture, flowers and lasers.  We were welcomed (Wominjeka) at the start and farewelled (Twaganin Ganin) at the end in the Woi-Wurrung language of the local Wurundiji people.

We loved it this year more than last year.  It was less busy.  We ate a light meal beforehand so we could enjoy the food at the Terrace (approximate halfway point).  The lights leading up to the Terrace were good but after it they were truly amazing.  Many of the lights moved and changed colour so the images were really dynamic.  By the end we felt it was better than last year.  Here are some of my photos. 

Why don't you know me?

 

 

 

Fire garden

 

Sea of Light

 

Skating Birds

 

 

On Country

 

 

 

First Peoples Melbourne
Art Trams x Lightscape

 

Lilies

 

Entrance to the Terrace of food carts

 

fantastic mushroom dumplings

 

warming mulled wine

 

Toast and Roast marshmallows

 

Sylvia ate a brulee doughtnut
while I hung out at the fire.

 

toasting and roasting marshmallows

 

 view from Terrace across lake to the city skyline

 

"Climb ever to the sun
and have the shadows fall behind you"

 

Winter Cathedral

 

 

Laser ferns

 

 

 

walking through hanging lights

 

changing colours of the hanging lights

 

 

trees lit up looking like giant parsley

 

 

 
Also see my visit to Lightscape, Melbourne Botanic Gardens in 2023.

Fairy nook for backyard garden: part 4: creating the garden

The garden on top of the fairy nook, that we created from an old toy oven (see Part 1), was simpler than the cafe section (see Part 3).  This was not to say it did not require some creative thinking.  One main issue for this part of the fairy nook were that it needed to be far more weather resistant than in the sheltered cafe below.  It would be far more exposed to rain and wind and heat.  The other issue I needed to contend with was doing a garden.  In an ideal world it would be lovely to have live plants everywhere but not terribly practical for upkeep.  In the end we did not have any real plants but used the painting (see Part 2) and artificial plants to create the impression of garden.  It is a whimsical take on a park cum woodland scene.

As with the other work I did on the fairy nook, I had no idea how this would turn out when I started.  Here is one of my first attempts at arranging some of our collected flower and nature items.  It wasn't right but it was a start. 

The white flower and then bunch of white and blue flowers were really beautiful metal flowers we found in Hope Street Space that we wanted to feature somewhere on the fairy nook.  After a few ideas (such as the white flower sitting on one of the oven knobs or the blue and white flowers glued randomly over the wall of the cafe) I decided to glue them to what used to be the oven clock.  Yes, above is a picture of the oven on its back so I could dry the glue on the flowers and trialing the placement of other items before gluing. 

I also experimented with some button decorations and even glued a green flower from a broach under the sign.  Despite a generous blob of glue (see the white patch), it had fallen sideways.  This part of the garden was done before the cafe so when I did the pictures in that section, I decided that the shiny green flower would look better and bring some much-needed light onto the back wall.  By then it had been straightened with masking tape while the glue dried.  I had to prise the attached flower off the wall, leaving a patch where the paint had also come away.  It wasn't too hard to patch it up with my paints even if in the final version it could not be seen.

When I was ready to do the rest of the garden I played around with how to place items.  Here the garden looks quite similar to its final version but it has lots of small differences.  The Minions were on a piece of cork but it was too high for them.  The rectangular planter next to the purse did not end up staying - we had planned to have crystal chips at the top of the dirt and some sort of live or fake plant in it.  The wooden bench on the other side of the purse does not have a back.  And the stone path looks quite different, even starting at the ladder on the side rather than on the front near the oven knob.

As you can see in this photo, we added a beautiful carnelian crystal with a little branch of crystals that sheltered the Minions.  It was something Sylvia had in her room that gave a lovely vibe to the corner..  Once we had decided to add the carnelian, we no longer had room for the little planter.  I had to I have also built up the fire with crystals and trialing lining the stone path with twigs.  The floral purse was found in an op shop and reminds me of the "Public Purse" public art in Burke Street Mall.  It is a fun addition to the mall and little kids like to sit on it.  So I imagine this would be a fun part of the garden, not just a pretty sight.

The "fairy nook" sign was made out of a piece of bark that I found on the side of the bike track.  The biggest challenge was that painting the name on it.  I had originally thought I might write "fairy garden" but I didn't have enough space.  "Garden" became "Nook" because it was shorter.  I used the outdoor paint to write the name.  Which seemed a good idea.  However when the fairy garden was put outside in the rain, the PVA glue got soft and somehow a bit of the words rubbed off and had to be glued back.  And ideally I would have written in thinner letters if I had a better thin brush.

A wooden seat or bench was always part of the plan.  One reason it appealed was that I did not like how the four hotplate knobs at the side brought to mind the garden's former life as an oven.  I had wanted to cover them up.  To make the bench, I used twigs that I found on the side of the bike path.  I clipped them to size with secateurs.  I glued them onto two icy pole (popsicle) sticks, that were trimmed to size, on the .middle two of the knobs  It seemed like a good idea to do this to make it easy to glue the twigs down.  It was not enough

If I did this again I might shave off the side of the twigs to give them more area to attach to the icy pole sticks.  I would also glue them onto some icy pole (popsicle) sticks before - rather than after - gluing the twigs onto the knobs because it would be easier to make sure they were trimmed to be the same length.  It would have also been easier to keep them together and position the seat so it was not so close to the top of the ladder.  The round twigs were not very steady and I had to hold them together with masking tape to keep them falling off the knobs while the glue dried (see below photo).

Above is the bush that I made out of some clippings off a pine vine that Sylvia had bought at Christmas but decided she did not want to keep.  The clippings were clustered around one of the oven knobs so you couldn't see it.  The knob helped me to to prop them up while they dried in a pool of glue, with a little extra drizzled on them.  I also added a smaller bush by the stone path that is not in this photo.  I loved how the PVA dried to be so clear it seemed invisible.

The seat was originally intended to be just a flat bench.  When I showed a friend a photo, she did not see it as a seat.  Through her eyes I saw it looked like a pile of logs.  It made me see I needed a back for my bench.  This time before attaching them to the rest of the bench, I glued the twigs to icy pole sticks that had been trimmed and painted brown.  Again I used some masking tape to keep them in place while they dried.  But for extra support I also glued some bits of twig below the icy pole sticks to prop them up.

Once the bench and the bush was finished there was only one oven knob showing.  Four knobs looked like an oven.  One knob looked like a cute little seat or table.  To add to the whimsy, I glued a butterfly charm on the knob with a tiny stone underneath it to make it stand up a bit and look active rather than resting.

I had tossed up between a fireplace and a well in the middle of the garden.  I loved a camp fire when I was a kid and it seemed less intrusive than the well, and also less work.  Making the fireplace was fairly straightforward.  I made the circle of white stones first, then placed some small chips of bark in the bottom and built up the longer sticks like logs.  I added some reddish crystal chips and poured a bit of golden glitter glue in parts.  

I had intended to have some fairies in the garden but couldn't find any around the house.  We have had many Minions in our house and had a couple of small rubbery ones hanging about.  Sylvia cut a wine cork in half.  We don't know where it came from.  Is it from years ago when I drank wine with E at home?  Sometimes I love it when I don't throw out stuff and it is useful later.  The half wine corks were too high so we can them in half again which worked.  The expressions on the Minons amuse me - Bob is so cheery and Kevin suspicious.  I just wish I had the patience to create some long sticks with tiny marshmallows that they could toast on the fire.

Next was the stone path.  There was not a lot of room for it. I needed space around the fireplace and seat.  So I reduced it from a cluster of stones on the path to a neater row of stones with twigs lining each side.  Sylvia donated a few crystals to include in the stones, such as the blue one in the above picture.

Now that we have had the fairy nook outside for days when it is raining I regret being so generous with the PVA glue.  At the time it was drying clear and seemed to guarantee things were not going to move.  Sadly the rain has added moisture to the glue that makes it white again.  I loved that the glue was non-toxic so it was easier (and cheaper) to use.  The nook had to return indoors to glue a few sticks on the ladder and bench that had moved when the glue softened.  This time I used Gorilla glue which is weather proof.  In future I would use a little of the PVA glue to attach things if they were to be exposed to rain.  Then when it was dry I would then add some Gorilla glue about the edges to keep them attached if the PVA glue softened.

I am pretty happy with the garden.  I had imagined more plants than we ended up including.  I made an effort not to have it too crowded.  We had talked about including some living ones like bits of moss or trailing plants.  I would love them but worried it would not be practical, given my experience with plants not thriving when I cannot look after them because I get distracted by unexpected life events.  Perhaps I am too much of a control freak to include plants that might ask more than I can give.  I have planned for this to be there a while and don't want a bad gardening moment to leave the design with bare patches or brown plants.  So this is great for a first go at a fairy garden.  I really like how it blends in among Sylvia's pot plants and feels like part of our garden.

My series of fairy nook posts:

• Part 1: upcycling a toy oven - a fairy nook overview
  
• Part 2: painting
• Part 3: creating the cafe
• Part 4: creating the garden (this post)

Fairy nook for backyard garden: part 3: creating the cafe

 

The most detailed part of our fairy nook was the cafe.  (See more about the fairy nook in Part 1, Part 2. and Part 4.)  It was lots of fun transforming the inside of the old toy oven into a whimsical fairy cafe but required lots of thinking creatively on how to realise our vision.  This means we had to look around us for ideas and ways to make do with what we had in the pile of stuff we had collected with the hope it might be part of our fairy nook.

When we were unsure what to do, one strategy was to start with anything.  Above is a go at the cafe.  We always had a table and chairs in mind.  Sylvia found a lacy doily to cover the plastic table but I was concerned about how to keep the fabric from getting manky outdoors.  The flower arrangement in the bowl ended up in the garden area at the top.  I liked the idea of the little Sylvania families figures from the dolls house but they also were not made for the outdoors.  It wasn't right but it was a start.

This photo shows the mess as we thought our way through creating the cafe.  It was messy and detailed.  My best friend was the bottle of PVA glue.  I have found out that it was great for not ust gluing things together but also painting over items to seal them.  It was also non-toxic and washed off easily so it was pleasant to use.

Sylvia bought a packet of cute little bottles filled with glitter and topped with cork stoppers.  We tipped out most of the glitter.  I miss lots of things from when Sylvia was little, but not glitter.  Sylvia put some of her crystal chips in a few and I put some tiny dried buds in another.  I painted some icy pole (popsicle) sticks brown and made some swirls of wood grain with a skewer.  After they dried I glued small stones under them and then glued the bottles on top.  Then I propped them up between boxes and used a skewer between the bottles and boxes to make sure they dried against where the wall would be.  Like I say, a lot of details were involved.

You might not have noticed at the top of the previous photo that there is a tub of semolina that I had siting on the gum leaves.  I had glued the leaves to the top of the plastic table.  It seemed very Shirley Barber but gluing the leave on and keeping them in place and flat was challenging.  A heavy object on top while the glue dried did the trick.

The story of making the bits of the fairy nook cafe jump about because there was a lot of waiting for the glue to dry on bits and pieces.  It made me impatient.  In fact, one evening when I was in the zone, I ran out of bottle tops I was using for the seats.  E had saved them for us and had more.  So I walked around to his place in the dark to collect more bottle tops.  Also check out all the glue on the owl picture.

More on the owl picture later but for now let's return to the table.  I had wanted to have the leaves hang over the edge but they were so brittle that if they bent they snapped.  So I trimmed the leaves to the edge of the table.

In the above photo, you can see that I was experimenting with cups on the table and a flower in the middle.  The artificial flower was in an acorn cup that I cut the bottom to make it steady.

These are the gum nuts that I used to make cups.  I picked them off a gum tree while they were still green and over a few weeks they dried up but seemed to keep the green hue.  I used a knife to slice off the bottom pointy stem so that they looked like squat cups with flat bottoms.  I liked how they looked like rustic pottery cups.

Back to the table.  I decided that the colour of the cups and the gum leaves were too similar.  The needed more contrast.  I decided to make place mats of this below sheet of leafy pattered adhesive vinyl that I found with the scrapbooking papers in an arts and craft store.  The plastic edges of the table were not quite right.  I glued triangles around the edge of the table like bunting to give it a touch of whimsy.  I took an old paintbrush and painted the PVA glue over the bunting edges and place mats to make it more sturdy. 

I also found an old hairpin with a teapot button on it.  I took the button and glued a pile of about 3 short pieces of icy pole sticks to the table (it is surprisingly easy to cut them into shorter pieces with scissors).  I glued a stone behind the teapot button to help it stand up. and had to prop it up until it set enough for me to then glued the teapot button on top of the icy pole stick stack so it could be seen above the flower.  I was finally happy with the table.

I painted glue over the toadstools that we had decided to use for seats around the table.  They were cheap foam mushrooms on wire sticks.  We had put a couple in the pot plants and found they faded quickly.  I hope that being under cover in the cafe and having a seal of glue will help stop this.  (Otherwise I might need to do some re painting. 

More challenging was working out how to stand them up once I removed the wire.  By then we had decided to brush glue over the cafe floor and scatter fake gross on it (see bag of green stuff in photos further up.  This helped with developing ideas about stands.  I squeeze a decent amount of glue into each bottle cap and pushed a decent amount of fake grass into it.  I squeezed more glue onto the fake grass and pushed a toadstool into each bottle cap.  The grass and glue seemed to create a bit of stability for the toadstool and once the glue dried it would stand up, though some were slightly wonky.

Here are the shelves of little bottles that I mentioned towards the start of this post when I dried them ready to glue on the cafe wall.  As you can see by the slightly crooked lower one, I didn't get them quite straight on the wall.  It was an awkward angle.  Sylvia filled some with crystal chips, I filled some with seeds from my sticks and gum nuts, and some of them had the original glitter left in them.  I also added an acorn cap bowl, a gum nut cup and a few plastic flowers.

It took a while to put together the cafe.  When I glued the shelves on, I had the old oven balanced on one side.  When I glued the pictures on the other side, I had to balance the oven on the other side.  This allowed the glue to dry without them slipping down the wall. 

I made a couple of little pictures: one with beads pasted into a tiny plate and one with a flower off a hair clip pasted into a bottle cap.  My favourite pictures were the ones of a glittery owl and a shiny green flower that I pulled off some broaches.  I used the leafy vinyl as backing.  I used the owl or flower to measure a piece of cardboard, then cut it to size, and measured a adhesive vinyl that I stick on the cardboard. 

Then I laid the rectangle on a piece of plastic, squeezed a lot of PVA glue over it.  I cut twigs to frame it and placed these around the edge, then positioned the owl or flower in the middle.  There was so much glue it took a while to dry.  Then I glued it to the wall.  Once the shelves and pictures on the side had dried, I had to glue the flower picture on the back wall and dry that.  Note that in above picture, the oven is on its back so that the flower picture can dry flat on the wall rather than slipping downwards.

I also made some bunting by cutting out diamonds and folding them in half over a piece of twine and pasted them for sealing.  I glued the bunting at the front above the cafe while I had it on the back to dry the flower picture.  I then attached a pennant in the middle that I cut out of business card and glued it to a triangle of cardboard with glue brushed over to seal it.  Then it was time to put the oven upright and glue everything down on the floor, starting at the back. 

Once everything was glued down I found a little toy fairy on a stand and glued this at the back.  Putting together the cafe was a long and fiddly part of the fairy nook project but worth the time and patience.  Then I turned my attention to the garden area of the nook, which I will write about in my next post.

My series of fairy nook posts:

• Part 1: upcycling a toy oven - a fairy nook overview
  
• Part 2: painting
• Part 3: creating the cafe (this post)
• Part 4: creating the garden