Land Art

You have to applaud the hort students at Cornell.
This "turfwork" covers more than one acre and is to be unveiled today, on Mother's Day. "Passengers flying in and out of Ithaca and people flying in to the East Hill Flying Club Mother's Day breakfast will have the best view," says Marcia Eames-Sheavly, Senior Extension Associate in Cornell's Dept. of Horticulture.   

Under the guidance of Eames-Sheavly and artist Jeff de Castro, the hort students "painted" their design onto the landscape using mulch, straw, and black plastic to turn the grass yellow in certain places.  It took them an entire semester, using a field at a hort research facility adjacent to the Robert Trent Jones golf course. Eames-Sheavly said the goal was to "create a simple, powerful, sensory surprise with maternal overtones nestled into the landscape."

I'm not sure about the maternal overtones, but this is pretty spectacular.  Wonder what you could do on a good-sized suburban lawn -- to view from a second or third-story window.

(image: Peter Cadieux)

Comments

[Michael (Snowman) Thomas]

It always amazes me how they are able to do stuff like that.

[Craig Cramer]

The image above is a simulation that one of the students did a few weeks ago. I added images to the Cornell site yesterday that a student took from a flyover on Thursday. It came out great -- even better than the simulation. You can see those images here: http://hort.cals.cornell.edu/cals/hort/news-events/turfwork.cfm

[Nancy Bond]

Amazing! I just checked out the Cornell's site -- what an incredible amount of work.