Tuesday 29 January 2008

Worth a visit


After seeing the sculptures on Sharon's blog I was reminded of the sculptures at Durham botanical gardens so I thought I would post a few of them.
The gardens are part of the university and is used for the students to do practical study so there are all kinds of garden settings and conditions including a hot house for tropical plants.

There were huge carved wooden sculptures of all the prominent men in North of Egland history. This is George Stevenson of Rocket and railways fame.

Behind each of the carved figures is a metal wedding type train which is a stencil of - in this instance - the railway track. Difficult to describe but very impressive. I used this one to create a digital special effect image which is on my web site. Hope to use it someday.

Other figures are the Venerable Bede, one of the Durham bishops, a shipping magnet, a mining magnet, St Cuthbert and a Durham Knight. They stand in a circle with the metal trains spreading outwards.

In a small lake there are metal sculpted storks and herons and among the trees was this fabulous gigantic insect patinating nicely.

2 comments:

sharon young said...

What a fantastic statue, like the digi version on your site, it's worked very well.
Ben would love this bug, he looks very impressive!

Purple Missus said...

You must have a fantastic collection of photographs Shirley. These are really interesting.
Going to pop over to your website now and have a look at the digi image.