Sunday, March 28, 2010

flower & garden show

the first thing i spotted walking into the garden show this weekend was franz witte’s clever wonderland croquet/mad hatter tea party setup. it made me want to use teacups as planters for herbs to make tisanes. not very practical maybe, but it would be fancy.


there was one room filled half with bonsai trees, many of them decades old, and half with orchids.






my favorite had to be the bug booth. dozens of colorful, much-larger-than-life, handmade metal bugs.







who could resist the mantises? this one’s now tasked with guarding the ootheca...no way are birds eating it this year.


2 comments:

JJ said...

Excellent pics as ever, Em. Like the bugs a lot. Do you think the birds will be fooled, though?

Emily said...

haha no, i doubt they would be. i’m trying to figure out some kind of wire mesh cage to put it in for protection. the main complication is that the babies cannibalize if they’re confined in close proximity to each other, so if i want more than one mantis i’ll have to build something with an easily-removable bottom and watch it like a hawk so i can let them out when they hatch. actually, now that i think about it, i might have some mesh that’s small enough to keep predators out and large enough for the babies to escape. where to locate the cage so that the babies don’t escape directly into the mouths of birds is part two of my conundrum...