A Garden Jewel in Johannesburg

Posted on November 25, 2014 by Janet

Our last private Johannesburg garden visit is to the spectacular Beechwood Gardens, owned by Christopher & Susan Greig. It’s a lovely house in the Hyde Park neighbourhood, designed in Romantic-Flemish style by Steffen Ahrends and owned originally by one of Johannesburg’s 20^th-century industrialists, cereal manufacturer Rudy Frankel.

Though the property’s name originally celebrated a massive copper beech tree that had to be removed after a storm, it is also graced by a huge specimen of North American water oak (Quercus nigra).

We are met by Beechwood’s full-time horticulturist Steven Gouveia and escorted via a shady side path toward the back garden. The property was originally landscaped in the 1940s by the renowned South African landscape architect Joane Pim, so the tree canopy is mature and the garden has good “bones”.

More than one gardener in Johannesburg has proudly drawn our attention to a beautiful shrub decked with mauve-striped white blossoms and flowering in dappled-heavy shade. It is the native South African forest bell bush (Mackaya bella) or “bosklokkiesbos” in Afrikaans, with azalea like blooms and glossy evergreen foliage.

Strolling through Beechwood’s woodland garden, our attention is drawn to a neat pile of cut tree limbs lining the path. It’s not firewood, says Steven, but simply a purposeful pile left to decompose and create sanctuary for nesting bees or other insects.

The path delivers us to the back garden, where empty clay pots await the season’s annuals (and remind us that this is, indeed, springtime in South Africa). And what’s this? Luscious yellow clivias (Clivia miniata var. citrina)…..

…. flowering like a little meandering river in the lawn under a shrub.

There was a time in the late 1980s when these newly-bred yellow clivias were so rare, they commanded a king’s ransom per single plant. There are numerous yellow colour forms now.

Christopher and Susan Greig are in the garden and greet us warmly. Christopher is the great-grandson of Charles Greig, who arrived in Gold Rush-gripped Johannesburg from Aberdeen in 1899. Soon he was producing clocks for the mines that were springing up around the young city, and over the next century, Charles Greig would become Johannesburg’s pre-eminent jeweler, with five stores in the city.

Susan brings out freshly-baked cupcakes (she runs a cooking school from the property) serving them beside the beautifully-furnished outdoor sitting area adjoining the house.

Then Christopher takes us on a garden tour, explaining what he’s done with the 3.5 acre garden in the 14 years that they have owned Beechwood, which is open to the public on the last consecutive Friday and Saturday of each month except December.

We begin with the series of six interconnected naturalistic ponds and a bog.

Though it’s too early in the season for the lotuses, the waterlilies are in full bloom.

And the ponds attract Egyptian geese, here preparing to swim away beside a planting of red Louisiana iris (Iris Hexagonae Group).

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I am not familiar with these stunningly beautiful and colourful Hexagonae irises, a complex hybrid mix of five southern iris species: I. brevicaulis, I. fulva, I. hexagona, I. giganticaerulea and I. nelsonii.

And here’s a closer look at the Egyptian goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca). It is native to Africa and was considered sacred in Egypt, where much of the breeding occurred.

The family swimming pool is simple and overlooked by a Luytens bench.

We step down onto the terrace adjoining the rose garden, where a pretty flower border greets us. Ranunculus (R. asiaticus) really seem to thrive in this climate, as they do in California in spring. The mixed colours are united with silvery lambs’ ears (Stachys byzantina).

Such attractive flowers – and excellent in spring bouquets.

Though mostly out of bloom this early in the season, the formal rose garden is spectacular with its boxwood-edged beds. It sits 2 metres (6 feet) below the lawns. Christopher designed the long colonnade on the left, bringing the handsome support pillars from elsewhere in the garden.

The rose garden is arranged around a formal fountain. Water for the fountains and water features is not a problem at Beechwood Gardens, which sits over a natural underground aquifer.

The sunken vegetable garden, designed by Christopher (who also grows the vegetables from seed), provides many of the ingredients for Susan’s cooking school, which is housed in the building in the background.

Like a French potager, it also features a classical central fountain and slightly raised brick-edged beds filled with all kinds of leafy plants. Here, the rhubarb is just about ready to harvest.

Later in the season (October corresponds roughly to May for temperate plants in South Africa), when the root vegetables and tomatoes have matured and the nasturtiums and cornflowers are in bloom, it must be gorgeous. Here’s the view looking back to a faux ruin.

Christopher is proud of being fully organic and encouraging all kinds of beneficial insects. To that end, he promotes the use of Mycoroot, a product that fosters healthy root growth.

Alongside the vegetable garden is a walkway flanked by fragrant French lavender and citrus trees.

Honey bees adore lavender, an excellent source of nectar — and, of course, lavender honey.

This afternoon we will leave Johannesburg and head north toward Kruger Park. But we couldn’t have finished our garden tour in the city with a lovelier, more diverse garden than Beechwood, thanks to the gracious welcome of Susan and Christopher Greig.

An Artist’s Johannesburg Garden

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Janet

Our second garden visit in Johannesburg was to the home of one of South Africa’s most renowned and revered artists, William Kentridge, and his wife, immunologist Dr. Anne Stanwix. From the moment you begin ascending the hairpin driveway past the shady dell of foxgloves…..

…towards the artist’s beautiful, brick studio nestled into the rocky face of Houghton Ridge…..

….. you realize that this 2-acre garden is very much about working with topography.

Arriving at the house level with its sweeping lawn and flower borders, you can’t help noticing the tree-house in a massive tree behind the studio.

There’s a swing hanging from the tree, too, and a lovely croquet lawn, homey touches that recall that this is not only the place where the Kentridges raised their three children, but also the home where William himself grew up.

Born in 1955, he was the son of two attorneys who represented people victimized by South Africa’s apartheid system, including activist Stephen Biko. Though much of his art has political overtones, it cannot be defined as being in anyone’s philosophical camp, save for his own. As he has said, “I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain ending – an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check, and nihilism at bay.”

Having explored William Kentridge’s work online since returning home, I wish very much that I’d had a chance to meet him. Specifically, I would have enjoyed hearing him talk about the parallels between the ephemeral and changing canvas that is a garden with the works of art he makes through the process of cyclical animation and erasure. Look at this work titled “Breathe”, created in his studio in 2008 as one of a triptych of films that were projected on the curtain of Venice’s Teatro La Fenice as the musicians warmed up. Or listen to him talk about erasing and reworking charcoal drawings for his stop-motion films. For me this mirrors, in a sense, what nature does over time to the order we attempt to impose on the land through the act of gardening — even in the way a carefully-built path like this one in the Kentridges’ lush garden would, in time, be erased by the foliage of plants eager to subsume it.

That path is the work of landscape designer Jane Henderson, who was commissioned to revamp the garden for a family wedding a few years ago. She consulted with William to create a series of garden rooms, each with its own style and plant roster.

We head toward the steep hillside at the back of othe main house, pausing for a moment to take in the sculpture below. It is the maquette for “Fire Walker”, the 10-metre high public work of art created by William and Gerhard Marx for Johannesburg for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. It recalls the women who walk through the city with traditional cooking braziers balanced on their heads in which they cook the sheeps’ heads or “smileys” that are then offered as street food.

From a shady spot near the bottom of the slope, I gaze back down through the native calla lilies (Zantedeschia aethiopica) and Natal lilies (Clivia miniata) – surely two of South Africa’s finest gifts to the world of horticulture. Over the next few weeks, gazing out our bus window, I would see calla lilies growing in damp spots beside the highways.

We pick our way carefully up the stone path and steps. Jane Henderson thinned out the thick vegetation that was once here, adding groundcovers and native acacias and turkey-berry trees (Canthium inerme) to provide vertical interest.

As we ascend, the aspect becomes sunnier and the plant palette — including an impressive array of succulents like aloe, kalanchoe, euphorbia and senecio — more adapted to Johannesburg’s heat,. I greet a gardener perched like a mountain goat over a flower bed.

Here is an interesting succulent that was new to me, Kalanchoe sexangularis, still wearing its red winter colour (due to anthocyanin pigments that protect it from the sun’s rays). Soon it will turn green and produce yellow flowers.

Finally, we arrive very near the top. In Afrikaans, this rocky hill is called a koppie or kopje.

Turning around, we have a spectacular view over northern Johannesburg. Although Jane Henderson wanted to remove the columnar cacti (Africa has no indigenous cacti, only look-alike euphorbias), William enjoys seeing their profile against the night sky, so they remain.

The path down crisscrosses the other half of the slope and takes us past a different palette of plants, including society garlic (Tulbaghia violacea) and aloes now out of bloom.

That splash of magenta-pink is another of South Africa’s wonderful native succulents, trailing ice plant (Delosperma cooperi).
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Added spring colour comes from daylilies and Chinese forget-me-nots (Cynoglossum amabile).

Honey bee photography is one of my passions, so I’m delighted to add to my collection the native South African honey bee (Apis mellifera scutellata), here on the Chinese forget-me-nots.

And I loved this combination of native pink Scabiosa incisa with the Chinese forget-me-nots and a lone yellow bulbine.

We see our very first South African pincushion protea (Leucospermum sp.) here as well.

We pass a native fever tree (Vachellia xanthophloea, formerly Acacia) with a bird’s nest in its crook. The tree’s common name has an interesting history. When European colonists came to Africa and contracted malaria, they blamed this green-barked tree, which prefers to grow in damp places, not realizing that their fever came from a bite of the mosquitoes that also like to live in damp places. Interestingly, the fever tree’s greenish-yellow trunk has been shown to conduct photosynthesis, something quite rare in trees.

At the base of the slope, behind the house, is one of the most unusual water features I’ve ever seen: a kind of waterfall made with a tiered series of fountains. It was inspired by a garden William had seen in Italy.

The water emerges from the spout and hits a metal pedal, splaying it out perfectly.

I wander through the garden in front of the house, noting all the beautiful plants that can be grown in this climate, from lush Australian tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica) to geraniums from Madeira (Geranium maderense)…..

…… to Japanese cherries and Australian bottlebrushes (Callistemon citrinus)…..

… to regular cottage garden perennials like columbine, here offering pollen to the South African honey bee.

It is a gracious and beautiful garden — and a good transition from the plants we know from home…..

……to the wonderful indigenous flora — like this agapanthus — that we are about to encounter over the next few weeks on our South Africa garden tour..

A Johannesburg Eden on Four Levels

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Janet

Standing in Minky Lidchi’s delightful garden in the Houghton neighbourhood of Johannesburg, South Africa, and gazing at her beautiful home with its terraced beds and intriguing front pergola with its classic columns, it’s difficult to imagine how it must have looked in 1976, when Minky, then a first year Architecture student at Wits University (the University of the Witwatersrand ), acquired the property.

“The house was really an ugly duckling,” she recalls, “and the garden was totally nondescript, except for three jacaranda trees on the eastern side.” The land, which measures 90 metres in length by 46 metres in width, sloped upwards with a 5 metre (16 feet) increase in elevation from front to back. In time, Minky would formalize five broad terraces from the incline on the slope of the site — but when she took possession, the house sat comfortably on what would be the third terrace and a tennis court occupied the fifth terrace at the rear of the property.

After renting the house out for two years, Minky then began to improve the property. “With a very limited budget I did a simple renovation to the small house, creating vistas through and across the site from the public and private spaces inside the house.” A garage and staff building were transformed into a cottage and smaller staff quarters “creating the spaces between the buildings for courtyards and pond areas.” Today, these skilfully-crafted spaces not only separate the buildings but create small journeys – like the kitchen courtyard below– that Minky has made more interesting by filling with potted plants and treasures from her travels, including the marble bath at the far end.

The koi pond, below, is flanked by an ivy-clad wall backed by a tall topiary hedge and even has a little “island” with table and chairs. Atop the pillars are sandstone carvings, some of the many works of art that grace the garden today.

Recalls Minky: “The side pond began as a space to tie the house and cottage together, but both spaces needed a focus, yet privacy. I decided a pond would be ideal as one could view it from both builidings.”

In 1982, she embarked on a second renovation, this time cladding the house’s exterior in sandstone tiles reminiscent of the Westcliffe sandstone used in the architecture of older houses in the area. Her aim was to give it a rectangular box form with a simple, pitched roof “like a child’s drawing” of a house. “Here I started addressing the edges around the house and built the terrace with large columns and stairs and planters in front of the house.” A pair of white marble buddhas from Mandalay in Burma flank the front steps, below.

The front terrace has become a favourite place for Minky to enjoy the sounds and views of the garden. She loves collecting real objects that once had practical uses, such as the gypsy cooking pot on the table. At the centre is a Mexican “circle of friends” sculpture.

Gardening began in earnest then as well, and she drew upon the memories of the wonderful European and English gardens she had visited as a child with her mother, “an eccentric gardener”. She began to plant slowly, feeling her way by trial and error with the help of Lot, below, her long-time “left-hand person” in the garden and on the property.

Once again, the house was rented out, but Minky was now a qualified architect with a practice that allowed her to put more time and resources into the property. She began work on the bottom terrace at the front of the garden, adding the round pond visible from the front door of the house. “The idea in developing the site was to create vistas wherever possible, and I took my cue from the slope and the rectangular shape of the house.”

In 2002, after more than 25 years of renting the house out and being its absentee gardener, Minky finally moved in and began working on the upper terrace nearest the back of the property. “I took away the tennis court and created the grapefruit and lemon orchard, which now has cherry trees as well, adding to my own produce of existing vegetables and herbs.” The orchard consists of a formal, four-square garden carpeted with fragrant Spanish lavender, and the cherry trees have produced their very first bowl of cherries.

The Spanish lavender (Lavandula stoechas) attracts honey bees which in turn pollinate the citrus blossoms.

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And the small water feature in the path.

Here, at the very top of the garden, an arch inset with a millstone rests atop a carved screen from Jaipur, India.

“Whenever I can, I take the opportunity to travel,” says Minky. “The garden is filled with finds from distant lands. I sometimes brought entire containers – to sell some of the contents, and keep others. India was a treasure trove; the stone grilles in my garden walls were made there for me.”

Minky’s architectural background is evident on the swimming pool terrace, with its interior brick walls and those hand-crafted stone grilles. The arched Indian door leads to the garden’s working area, complete with a worm farm, compost, nurturing plant area and entrance to the cottage containing the pool pump and laundry area. Beyond is the rich borrowed landscape provided by her neighbour’s trees.

Another view of the swimming pool terrace, below. On the lawn is a sculpture titled ‘Desert Rose’ by the renowned Johannesburg artist Edoarda Villa. It is reminiscent of the crystal formations that occur under certain damp conditions in the desert in Namibia.

Heading back to the house from the pool terrace, the visitor walks down lushly-planted sandstone steps.

Fragrance is important to Minky – something she has called “the chaos of scent”. Her favourite perfumed plants include star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides) and murraya (M. paniculata). She planted gardenias near the car arrival and peppermint underfoot in the driveway so when she drives in “the wheels break the leaves and you smell the peppermint”. The kitchen courtyard features neatly pruned shrubs of yesterday-today-and-tomorrow (Brunfelsia pauciflora) “so that you can smell their perfume at dusk in and around the house.”

And she loves her roses, from the shrubs lining the second terrace wall to those climbing the pillars by the pond.

“There is no greater pleasure for me than picking my own roses, herbs and vegetables,” she says “As it is summer now, I have fresh roses in my bathroom, bedroom and dining room constantly, and share these with any visitor.” Her favourites? ‘My Granny’ with its small pink buds; ‘Just Joey’ is “so rewarding”; ‘Duftwolke’ has “a wonderful colour and a deep scent”; and ‘L’aimant’ is so beautiful and soft.

As a first-time visitor to South Africa in this very first garden on our 2-week tour hosted by Donna Dawson, I was impressed with the incredible range of plants that could be grown here, from temperate roses and stone fruits to tropical palms, citrus trees and tender shrubs such as the lovely Queen’s wreath (Petrea volubilis ).

Later on our trip, we would feast our eyes on the indigenous plants of South Africa’s renowned fynbos ecosystem, but this garden exuded the gracious and friendly ambiance of a skillfully-designed landscape that embraces visitors with open arms. Thank you, Minky, for the warm introduction to a brand-new continent.

An Autumn Visit to Kew Gardens

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Janet

A long October weekend in London…… Barely enough time to be a proper tourist, but certainly enough time to pay my customary visit to the Royal Horticultural Society Garden at Kew Gardens, aka “Kew”. Not to see it all, of course – that would take a very concentrated effort, especially arriving as I did in late morning and having to depart for a 5:30 pub dinner on Clarence Square in central London. But I saw enough to delight the senses, especially in a week when I also visited Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden in Cape Town!

Autumn colour was everywhere, but especially impressive in the American smoke tree (Cotinus obovatus) overhanging Kew’s Temple of Bellona.

The big tulip poplars (Liriodendron tulipifera) leading to the Orangery Restaurant had turned a beautiful golden-bronze.

Kew’s sweetgum trees (Liquidambar styraciflua) were wearing their multi-hued fall party dresses, too.

The towering black walnut (Juglans nigra) looked luminous in the afternoon sunshine, its big limbs supported with cables in its old age.

Even the umbrella plant (Darmera peltata) foliage was turning colour – a nice bonus for a marginal aquatic that flowered months earlier.

Bumble bees and honey bees were all over the single dahlias in the flower beds along the great walk, and the castor beans (Ricinus communis) made pretty partners..

And beside the Orangery, the cosmos were still putting out lots of blossoms.

As luck would have it, my Facebook friend Margaret Easter had contacted me before I left for South Africa and proposed we meet at Kew on my short stop in London on the way home to Toronto. What a great idea! I’ve done the same thing with Facebook friends in California. “Let’s have lunch together at the Orangery”, I suggested. And so we did, then trooped out with our cameras to while away a few afternoon hours.

There was no time to do the Kew Palace, sadly, even though I knew there was a great little garden behind that pretty building. During the late 1700s, it was the summer home of King George III and Queen Charlotte and their 15 children. When he developed mental illness in his later life (remember the film ‘The Madness of King George’?), it also became his sanitarium, and included strait jackets and cold baths. His granddaughter Victoria became one of England’s most famous monarchs.

We walked through the lovely Secluded Garden, which includes this pretty gazebo made of pleached lime trees (Tilia x euchlora). Inside is a sculpture.

And it was a big treat for two plant geeks to see the rare and recently discovered Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) without the zoo-like fence that once surrounded it. According to Kew, it is: “The only remaining member of an ancient genus dating back to the time of the dinosaurs, over 65 million years ago. This fascinating tree was only discovered in 1994, causing great excitement in the botanical and horticultural worlds.” Kew’s tree had even grown old enough to form cones.

We strolled through the elegant little Alpine House and had a look at some of the treasures Kew keeps there.

In autumn, there are many lovely fall-blooming bulbs, like the pretty Tournefort’s crocus.

Connecting the Alpine House to the Princess of Wales Conservatory was a sprawling rock garden with a surprisingly large number of plants still in flower. Margaret even found the accession label for one of her own thyme discoveries (she is a writer, speaker and holder of National Plant Collections® of thymus, hyssopus and satureja.) I liked this creeping persicaria (P. capitata), which was feeding loads of honey bees.

The Princess of Wales Conservatory is a favourite stop for visitors, especially on a cool autumn or winter afternoon, as it contains tropical plants that must be kept warm and humid. It was built in the late 1980s to replace a number of smaller greenhouses. Though opened in 1987 by Diana, the Princess of Wales, it is dedicated to an earlier Princess of Wales, Princess Augusta, the founder of Kew Gardens. The water garden inside is beautiful.

Everyone loves water lilies, of course, especially the gorgeous ‘Kew’s Stowaway Blues’ with its lush purple blossoms.

This one is much showier than the tiny, rare Nymphaea thermarum, billed as the smallest water lily in the world and the subject of a brazen theft in January 2014. The crime, still unsolved, has been the subject of much media interest in the months since.
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There is a fabulous orchid collection in the conservatory, with some of the finest specimens arrayed fetchingly up the staircase to the upper level.

Upstairs, the bromeliads get misted regularly, creating the cloud forest conditions necessary for these rainforest beauties to thrive.

Outdoors again, we put on our coats and sauntered towards the enclosed Plant Family garden. On the way, I noticed that the spring-flowering sweetbay magnolia (M. virginiana) had put up a few shy autumn blooms.

Education is a prime focus of Kew and these interpretive signs mounted along the walk highlight the intersection of plant cells and useful botany, via some amazing microphotography.

The ornamental grass garden was in its lush October glory, the big miscanthus and panicum species swishing in the wind.

Outside the enclosed Plant Family garden, the sage border was at peak bloom, showcasing the fall value of these wonderful plants (many here are true shrubs).

For anyone wanting to grow salvia species and cultivars, this border is a must-see in late summer and autumn. Honey bees and bumble bees, of course, call it a “must-bee” border.

The hour was growing late, but there was time to wander inside the walled garden to see what was still in bloom.

There were penstemons, dahlias, sennas and the odd rose. Nerines are always an autumn treat, where the season is long enough.

And the students’ vegetable gardens looked quite superb!

But sadly, our afternoon was coming to a close. I looked longingly at the big Palm House, framed with the magnificent cedar of lebanon (Cedrus libanyi), but it needs at least an hour to do it justice, and wasn’t to be.

I have visited the Marianne North Gallery on every Kew trip, but that lovely haven would have to wait for another visit as well. Here’s a photo from 2008.

Just a few minutes for a stop in the plant sale area. Nothing to buy for me, of course, but I’d have loved to tuck a few goodies into my suitcase.

And is it just me, but is this not the prettiest wall ever, with its aquamarine downpipe and window frames and fall-burnished Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata)? It was my last stop: the Kew Loo! And on that note…….

Making Way for the New in Olde London

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Janet

Whenever I visit London, I’m awed, architecturally speaking, by the easy and fluid juxtaposition of the very new and the very, very old. I felt that especially during a late October visit to the Tate Modern Gallery, the former 1947 Bankside Power Station with its massive turbine hall, beautifully converted and opened in 2000 to showcase modern art. In the fourteen years since then, an astonishing 40 million people have visited. Gazing down on the turbine hall, I could only imagine how it must have looked carpeted in ceramic sunflower seeds during the Ai Weiwei show a few years back.

A little later, while lunching on a delicate grapefruit & watercress salad, I paused to gaze out the Tate’s window across the Thames River. A landscape in moody autumn grey, the far shore is dominated by the magnificent dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral atop Ludgate Hill, the highest point in London (though it barely feels like a hill when you’re on it).

I tried to imagine how London must have looked in the early 1600s before the great fire that burned down the previous cathedral and forty acres of the city. Actually, you don’t have to imagine; you can get a feel for that in this 1616 etching, in which the largest building is St. Paul’s Cathedral. That church was the third dedicated to St. Paul to occupy the site, the first having been built in 604 AD.

Three days after the Great London Fire ignited on September 2, 1666 in a bakery on Pudding Lane, the old St. Paul’s Cathedral (depicted at the centre left of this painting) lay in smoldering ashes. At the time of the fire, architect Christopher Wren had been advising the Anglican Diocese of London on repairs to the old church. After the fire, he was commissioned to design a new cathedral.

Though its construction required a span of 35 years from 1675 to 1710, religious services began there in 1697. More than three centuries later, it has seen dozens of royal weddings, funerals and coronations – not to mention surviving World War II’s Blitz. And because this is (nominally) a garden blog, I offer a view of it through a venerable old London plane tree (Platanus x acerifolia) growing nearby.

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When the Millennium Bridge opened to pedestrians on June 10, 2000, there was one tiny problem. It wobbled. Quite a lot. Having just got over fears of everything from laptops to planet earth crashing as the new millennium dawned, people were understandably shaken, not stirred. So two days later, the footbridge was closed and the structural experts called in to have a look. According to Wikipedia:, “The bridge’s movements were caused by a ‘positive feedback’ phenomenon, known as synchronous lateral excitation. The natural sway motion of people walking caused small sideways oscillations in the bridge, which in turn caused people on the bridge to sway in step, increasing the amplitude of the bridge oscillations and continually reinforcing the effect. On the day of opening the bridge was crossed by 90,000 people, with up to 2,000 on the bridge at any one time.”

The Millennium Bridge took two years to fix. How? According to Wiki, “By the retrofitting of 37 fluid-viscous dampers (energy dissipating) to control horizontal movement and 52 tuned mass dampers (inertial) to control vertical movement”. Controlling the bridge’s natural wobble cost £5M and inspired an acoustic art installation at the Tate called ‘Harmonic Bridge’ which amplified the sound of the cables through the Turbine Hall.

Crossing the bridge today, you have a wonderful sightline to St. Paul’s on the north bank.

One of the most interesting new buildings in London sits between the heads of my husband and eldest son in this family shot taken on the bridge. Opened in 2012 and reaching 1,014 feet at its pointy top, The Shard, as it’s known, is the tallest building in the European Union. Designed by Renzo Piano, who was reportedly inspired by sailing ship masts and the London spires in Venice painter Canaletto’s works, it got its name from a report by English Heritage which complained that the design was “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London”.

I rather like Renzo Piano’s Shard, and despite what the English Heritage stuff-shirts say, I think those who make the climb to the top and gaze out on the 2000-year old city stretched below will agree. Olde London, after all, has always been a magnet for the audacious and new.

Janet Davis Explores Colour

In the garden & the world

Monthly Archives: November 2014

A Garden Jewel in Johannesburg

An Artist’s Johannesburg Garden

A Johannesburg Eden on Four Levels

An Autumn Visit to Kew Gardens

Making Way for the New in Olde London

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