During the past year, Ron Hoess and I have been helping the New Jersey Flower and Garden Show with a plan to introduce miniature settings into the show space created by the garden clubs of New Jersey. We gave a lecture to the Rake and Hoe club in New Jersey and then met with many of the heads of the New Jersey clubs to present the idea. This year, in their show which opens tomorrow and continues through Sunday, they have four entries for their first version of the show. I will show image after their judging is complete
In the meantime, I was invited to exhibit some non-judged pieces in the show so I brought the Harry Potter greenhouse and a preliminary mockup of the centerpiece of the Women’s Pavilion at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. I plan do recreate the entire American section of the Women’s Pavilion in one foot-to-one-inch scale. This display was just playing with some of the ideas in the pavilion, including having a central fountain surrounded by plants and having women’s handicrafts displayed in cases nearby. The actual recreation will be faithful to the drawing and photographs of the real pavilion from 1876. I also played with scale with my planting, trying not to be concerned so much by size as much as seeing which plants look right. The results are mixed because while all the miniatures are in the scale, the plants vary widely in their realism. But the actual recreation will only use artificial plants so that problem will be easily solved. It was still a fun experience…but now, back to The Birds (and our huge snowstorm).
The Harry Potter Greenhouse is basically the same but most of the live plants have been replaced. I left in some artificial plants and some dried ones and posted a sign inviting the audience to see if they could tell the difference. I also added Hermione’s cat, Crookshanks!
I’ll be giving a talk on miniature gardening at the show on Sunday, Feb. 16th, at 12:30 (see the schedule here).
Anthropology of the World's Fairs 