By Jim Bishop, for Let's Talk Plants! March 2022.Back in February 2018 and April 2018 I wrote two articles for the newsletter about making mosaic pavements and walkways in our garden. Since then I've continued making more mosaics and here's an update.We enjoyed hosting the 86 members of the San Diego Horticultural Society in our garden on January 2. After so many months, it was great to see gardening friends in person. And equally exciting to show them all the projects I worked on during the

Glass tile, tiny pebbles and shells. About 9" in diameter 3" thick. Weighs 11 pounds. Sold Website || Etsy || Facebook ____________

A sidewalk in the center of Lisbon, Portugal In the mid 1980's I made my first journey to Europe. I flew to Madrid, and then took a bus to Lisbon, Portugal to meet up with a friend. I arrived early and got an affordable, funky room in the attic of an old building on the Largo de São Domingo, which was paved in a grid with cut blocks of white limestone and black basalt. I had a view of the Praça and could open the window, so I bought an inexpensive bottle of sparkling wine and sat on the sill and gazed out over the square to the Alfama, the old city of the Moors. Lisbon is one of the oldest cities in the world, with a history spanning more than 3,000 years. So there is much hidden beneath the surface. In the morning I went out for a walk and was astounded by the extraordinary sidewalk pavements. I've never fully recovered. Mosaico Português, or calçada portuguesa has been used to express design in outdoor urban paving since the 1,800's. The patterns are diverse and cover a multitude of styles from Baroque to modern. It seems that every city block had a different motif and you can tell where you are depending on the designs on the sidewalks. Here I was in a city you could visit just to see the sidewalks. This was a rather profound shock to my psyche. We didn't have sidewalks worth looking at where I grew up. Pavement can be beautiful! This is a video I found that uses an acrobatic cyclist to showcase a number of stunning pavements in the city. The classic wave pattern was originally used to pave areas redeveloped after the tsunami following the Great Earthquake of 1755. A third of the city's population perished in the earthquake and 70,000 died in Morocco, Spain, and Portugal from the tsunami that followed. The quake occured on All Saints Day when the cathedrals, which all collapsed, were full. Most of what you see in the city today dates from after the earthquake, which opened the earth 15 feet in places. There is an in depth article on the event at https://www.sms-tsunami-warning.com/pages/tsunami-portugal-1755#.XoAWEC-ZNsM From Lisbon we traveled to the Algarve in the south of Portugal, and then in to Southern Spain and Andalucia. I took some very academic classes in the landscape history in college and was tantalized by images from lectures on gardens in Spain, Italy, and India that I would later journey to as a form of pilgrimage. A visit to the Alhambra forever changed the way I would design gardens from then on. The Patio of Yussef II in the gardens of the Alhambra, Granada, Spain Mosaic walkway of the Parador, the Alhambra Many of these formal designs are remeniscent of carpets. As I've become more adept at constructing crafted gardens I've also developed an interest in weaving and carpet looming. Most of the carpets in my home are Persian. A late 19th Century Persian Carpet in my living room with Arabesques of Grape Vines, I've stared at this for hours Originally many of these carpets were woven to be laid out in camps of caravans traveling across the desert. Garden carpets were portable Edens, a flower filled portable oasis surrounded by a protective wall on which you could recline and sleep. While my first mosaic patio was very organic, based on sub atomic particular forms and waves of energy, my first commission to build a patio was a Persian carpet. This carpet mosaic is about 11 x 18 feet in size My portfolio was fairly lean in the beginning but I worked hard and was able to do some fairly nice stone work. We learned how to work with mortar, laying bricks in a small urban park project when I was in college. So I developed a technique of setting pebbles in to a bed of wet mortar and then flattening it with a piece of plywood. Its a fairly low tech but tedious process. My wavy patio at home was garnering some attention. I received a Golden Trowel Award from Garden Design Magazine for my small, pebble encrusted garden. People seemed to like what they saw. Again, America is mostly paved in asphalt and concrete so the intricacies of pebble mosaic are a baffling concept for the average American. I notice it when I read the comments when people see photos of my mosaics on social media. "Can you walk on it? It must have taken forever. It must hurt your feet. Want." A DNA Molecule mosaic in the parking strip My new clients were remodeling a large historic home on a busy corner in Northwest Portland. The garden is quiet small, and most of the windows look right down on to the sidewalk. So I built mosaics in the heavily trafficked parking strips between the old linden street trees. Pebble mosaics look great from above. They had some beautiful woven carpets in their house and a grand staircase with tall leaded glass windows looking down on to the garden. So I proposed that we build a pebble mosaic carpet for the patio, which would take up the majority of the garden area. I built a low seat height wall around two sides of the patio area, which is something I have done in many of my gardens projects to provide a place to sit without having furniture. I've always been interested in the cosmos and myths of creation, so I made the center medallion of the carpet a lotus blossom. Lotuses are considered a symbol of purity in Eastern religions because the cellular structure of the plant does not allow mud to stick to it. Water beads up on the surface. Buddha images are often seated in a lotus blossom, a pure, clean base detached from the Earth. This central 8 petaled flower would symbolize the Big Bang, the explosion of energy that is believed to have been the birth of our Universe. Expanding outward are a series of flower like galaxies. The carpet is surrounded by a border that is a crenalated wall with flowers growing from stylized vines. So the carpet is essentially a walled garden and metaphor for the Universe. By setting this intention, the concept provides a basis for contemplation and meditation. I hired two people to help me, one who sorted pebbles by shape and color and the other who mixed mortar and infilled the patterns I laid out with the field of black that makes up the majority of the mosaic. I had found a fairly good quality pile of drain rock at a stone yard that I could buy by the cubic yard, and Erin would sort through the pebbles with me until she thought she would lose her mind. Sorting is tedious work that many of you won't have the tolerance to do if you ever try this. It took a couple of weeks to lay the drainage pipes and grade and compact the base for the patio, and 3 weeks to form and build the mosaic. I left permeable gaps between the border and main body of the carpet so that water could nourish two large trees growing by the patio, and make it easier for the large area to drain. Labrador violets have seeded in to the gaps over time. The Adirondack chairs in the photo have since gone away. Garden photographer Alan Mandell photographed the patio, which later appeared in Fine Gardening magazine and on the cover of Landscape Architecture accompanying articles I wrote on building pebble mosaics. Its shown up on a number of websites and Pinterest since then. I like creating small gardens, and often develop room like spaces. Garden carpets are a great way to make that room like space more literal. But the first one I built was by far the largest. Most of what I have built since then are more like an area rug. Portland garden celebrity Lucy Hardiman arranged for me to give a pebble mosaic workshop for the Hardy Plant Society where I built the first of her "Flying Carpets" in a garden parking strip in front of their Victorian Home. For the record I don't give workshops anymore. They are exhausting endeavors. We used cut Indian granite cobbles for the border that came from Lakeview Stone in Seattle, and Mexican Beach Pebbles purchased by the bag. I hand collected the gold and red pebbles from a beach on the Columbia River as well as the larger accent stones. The second carpet I built was based on an Anatolian Turkish Tribal design, as was the third. An Anatolian tribal carpet design I built along with two others in the parking strip of a well known garden in Portland, Oregon The fourth was more ornate, with a Persian influence somewhat reminiscent of the Birth of the Universe carpet. I later built another carpet mosaic in the French Aubusson style for Lucy's friend Nancy Goldman at her garden Nancyland, for an article being written for Better Homes and Gardens magazine. We placed glass doorknobs in the corners ringed with pebbles to make flowers and a cut crystal coaster in the center medallion. Moss overtakes a carpet mosaic in the parking strip at Nancyland My friend, landscape architect Mert Hauck Geiger designed a carpet mosaic for clients incorporating terracotta tiles that I built in a sunken space between the house and garage, with a large double lotus medallion surrounded by flowers and a crenalated wall. It requires a great deal of care to mix materials like this, as the pebbles are organic shapes and the tiles have such straight edges, so a lot of sorting for uniform shapes was required. The Beacraft Levy patio incorporates tiles in to the design When I bought the former Crack house next door to my original house I spent 7 years gutting and restoring it from a very dilapadated state. The garden surrounding my houses are tiny, and I wanted to build a Persian carpet based on a design I had seen, with an Islamic Mihrab, or altar that is oriented towards Mecca for prayer in front of the house. Inside the niche frame are two Cypress trees representing longevity, and a Tree of Life centered between them. Persian Sarouk Carpet with Cypress Trees and a Tree of Life It took me 4 years to collect the pebbles I needed to build this mosaic, which is about 4x6 feet in size. I use pebbles collected from the wild in my garden rather than sorting from piles in stone yards. I think wild collected stone is more magical as the memory of the places I gathered them are attached to them. Because the carpet design is directional it is viewed from the entry walk. A sandstone carving of the Sarnath Buddha I brought back from Bubaneshwar, Orissa, in India sits at the end of the carpet, maximizing the visual potential of this tiny garden space. The Sarnath Buddha holds his hands in the teaching mudras, with the Wheel of Law behind his head and his diciples at his feet. My next carpet project was a small entry mat at the front of a gate as a trade for steel work that a friend did around my garden. I was using a lot of hand sorted stones picked from an assortment of colored pebbles called Montana Rainbow Mix. Red is the predominant color, but there are also gold, green, purple, and white pebbles in smaller quantities. I used red for the main body of the carpet, and Indonesian turquoise pebbles purchased by the bag, along with Mexican Beach pebbles and some round flat beach stones I collected from the wild. There is a central lotus medallion and spiraling arabesques, and a simple crenalated border wall. It makes an eye catching threshold to the garden behind the gate, which has paths made of stepping stones with a complimentary design. Sam's carpet at the entrance to his garden A garden designer from Portland was working on a project for friends in Los Angeles when she came across the Birth of the Universe carpet while visiting a friend who lived there. She talked me in to flying to LA to look at the garden remodel where I was asked to built an inset in a poured concrete patio outside the newly remodeled kitchen doors. I wasn't wild about the patio but I loved the doors and the kitchen, and created what is probably the most precisely executed mosaic I've ever done. I hand picked the material in Portland and drove them down to LA. I laid out the design in sand to determine exactly what I needed for the various lines and fields of pebbles in the design, which was inspired by Moroccan style carpets they had in the house. I cut tiles of Turkish Limestone with a small stone saw to create the star like medallions and used glazed 8 pointed star shaped tiles I bought from the Pratt and Larson Tile Company in Portland. I then removed the pebbles, keeping them sorted in piles, and reassembled the mosaic, setting it in wet mortar using 1x4 forms to set the sections, maintaining the straight lines in the design. The finished mosaic is very fine. It has undulations that translate well to the character of a woven carpet. Its held up well over the years. The climate in LA is mild so the tiles haven't popped out as there aren't freezing temperatures. When my clients who I built the Birth of the Universe carpet decided to build an underground garage for two cars, we adapted the design so that it would have a flat patio roof you could walk on to from the narrow area around the house. This was technically the most difficult patio I have ever built. We used cut stone tiles in 4 colors that matched the color scheme on the house. The clients had traveled to Spain and Argentina and liked the idea of a ballroom floor with Moorish 8 pointed star medallions centered in a field of golden stone tiles from India that have wonderful fossilized patterns in them that are sometimes remenscent of Japanese landscape paintings or fern fronds. The patio drains perfectly in to two small drain holes on one side. Laying out cut stone for the patio design This was not an easy task, and you often see large puddles on pavements like this because it is hard to get the pitch right so that all the water drains off of the surface. We had to seal the roof with an elastomeric rubber like sealer so that water wouldn't leak through the concrete pour. Then we used a latex additive to the mortar mix to give it a stickier bonding quality. It took an enormous amount of cutting to produce all of the pieces fitting together in this design, and I will never do it again! It is perhaps the prettiest garage roof I have ever seen though, so perhaps it was worth all the effort, and there are no puddles! At the entrance to the garage I built an inset mosaic carpet with some similarity to the Birth of the Universe carpet to bring some continuity to the garden. It is like a mat in front of the nicely crafted garage door and can be seen from the roof terrace when looking over the railing. There is a lot of foot traffic on this street and people often stop to admire the mosaic. The stones we used were chosen for their larger thickness so that they would embed well in to the mortar and not pop out when driven on. Driveway inset carpet mosaic Add caption Last Summer I was commissioned to build a mosaic carpet at the entrance to an extravagant home in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. Again I had to hand sort all of the pebbles in Portland and then transport them down to LA. I cant say I love the drive, or working in that city. It was not a fun project, but the house is impressive and I wanted the design to be inspiring for me as well as the clients and their guests, as they entertain a lot. I worked out a concept based on photos of the architecture of the entrance to the house, which has double doors with square panels on each door. The entry area and site of a proposed pebble mosaic I had photographed a carpet in the Museum of Islamic Art in Istanbul , Turkey years ago that is a classic plan view of a Persian Chahar Bagh, or four quartered garden divided by the Four Rivers of Paradise as described in the Bible and the Koran. A classic Chahar Bagh garden carpet divided by the four rivers of paradise, Museum of Islamic Arts, Istanbul I love how this carpet depicts the plan view of a paradise garden, with a square pool with a fountain, and fish swimming in stylized rippling water. The rivers frame four planting beds filled with flowers and abstracted plants and patterns. I used 1x4 inch boards to form the areas, and constructed the border of the carpet, using red pebbles and 8 pointed glazed tile stars. 8 pointed stars are an Islamic motif comprised of two overlapping squares, representing the overlaying of time (the four seasons) and space (the four cardinal directions). I again used Montana Rainbow Mix pebbles as a source and spent many long tedious hours sitting on the pile at the stone yard, wetting them so that I could see the colors. I was able to collect enough green to make the rivers and plants. I used small black Mexican Beach pebbles for the borders. They come in black and a kind of olivine green, which I used for tree trunks and for the Cypresses. I had to rent a vehicle to do the 900 mile drive so that I could fly back, and rented an apartment on Airbnb for 8 nights. Out of town projects are expensive for this reason and these costs need to be taken in to consideration when proposing out of town commissions. Montana Rainbow pebbles at All About Stone in Portland Once the border was completed, I set the square pool at the center with a tile mandala that would represent the fountain, where the spring of water would emerge to irrigate the garden. The star tiles also suggest the night sky reflecting on the surface of the water. Central Medallion with 8 pointed stars Then I framed and set the four rivers. In the Book of Genesis names the rivers as the Pishon, Gihon, Chidekel (The Tigris) and the Phirat (The Euphrates). There are texts that refer to the Pishon as being the Ganges in India, and Gihon as the Nile in Africa. The Four Rivers of Paradise in place Now that the rivers were in place I was able to start working on the four part garden, or Chahar Bagh. This was the trickiest part as my pebbles were not the most refined and I was under time constraints. I couldn't start work until the sun had passed over the house and there was a shadow over my work space. It was in the high 80's and 90's so the time I had to set the pebbles was shortened by the speed with which the mortar would dry. I had a limited range of colors to work with to make convincing beds of plants. So the design was in part determined by the quantities of pebbles I had. I used tiny black Mexican beach pebbles to make small planting beds that alluded to plowed soil with simple stylized flowers in them. The predominant plants in the garden around this house are tall Italian Cypress trees, and handsome Olive trees, so I opted to make both types of trees in rectangles in the corners. I finished the work right on schedule, with a sore back and a mess to clean up. I had to leave the acid wash cleaning to a maintenance contractor as I flew home the next day. I instructed them to let the mortar cure for two weeks before pouring a diluted mix of one part Muriatic Acid mixed with two parts water, letting it disolve the mortar film that make a greyish cast on the pebbles. The acid also exposes some sand in the mortar so it isn't a white cement look between the stones. Adequate protection, long sleeves, chemical proof long gloves, and a respirator are needed. The fizzling mixture of the acid reacting to the base in the mortar is hosed off with a spray nozzle which further dilutes and neutralizes the acid. Freshly acid washed mosaic The lawn was then replaces where it had been damaged. The final photo is one taken with someone's phone. I don't think I'll ever be back to see it again. The completed Four Rivers of Paradise Carpet Mosaic I'm sure this wont be the last carpet mosaic I'll be building. They work well as a design element in the right setting in a garden, have the potential for lovely references, and do a nice job of bridging architecture and nature in to a work of art. And they allude to paradise, which is what gardening is all about for me. A magnificent Persian carpet with Cypress trees in a lush garden Thanks for reading, Jeffrey

Mushroom Mosaic Fine Art Prints and Art Gifts On a sidewalk in downtown Asheville, NC last September. Camera Data Make:Canon Model:Canon EOS 5D Shutter Speed:1/16 second Aperture:F/4.0 Focal Length:35 mm ISO Speed:50 Date Taken:Sep 25, 2012, 5:18:50 PM Software:Adobe Photoshop 7.0 Sensor Size:19mm

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Earth is the 3rd closest planet to the sun after Mercury and Venus. It is the only planet not named after a Roman or Greek God. The name Earth is derived for an Anglo Saxon word Erde which has Germanic origins. It is the densest planet in our solar system and the largest of the 'terrestrial planets'. Earth was formed about 4 1/2 billion years ago and simple molecular life forms originated in the planet's seas about a billion years later, possibly around thermal vents deep in the oceans. These organisms proliferated and began forming a biosphere that significantly altered the planet's atmosphere, creating an ozone layer that blocks life inhibiting solar radiation. This enabled life forms to eventually move from the seas to land masses. Earth is in just the right place for life to happen. Its all a matter of circumstance that this little speck in the Universe developed in the way it did. And the results of this chemical manifestation have been magnificent. The planet is in constant flux in a symbiotic melange of systems that adapt to every modulation in the environment. The organisms that thrive here have taken advantage of every circumstance in what was an ever expanding variety of species until our current species came along. Its believed that a meteorite ended the era of the dinosaurs, who ruled the Earth for 180 million years. We've been here for about one million years, at first living as part of the ecosystem, until we attained the ability to alter the environment in order to subsist on a more controllable level. In the last 540 million years, the time span where the fossil records show the existence of large populations of complex hard shelled organisms, the Earth has experienced between 5 and 20 mass extinctions. Today our impact as a species is causing another one. Our hominid ancestors developed in to a highly adaptable species, capable of living in diverse climates from the tropics to the Arctic. After the last ice age ended, Homo sapiens populations grew exponentially. We currently number about 7.2 billion people. That number is projected to increase by another billion in the next 10 years! The impact that this population explosion has had on this planet is far reaching. It is estimated that 30,000 species will become extinct in the next year, about one every 3 hours. A report in National Geographic magazine predicts that 1/4th of all species on the planet are threatened with extinction by 2050. One of four bronze ecosystem panels on the Prayer Wheel in Halls Hill Park Currently our disconnect from the natural world is at an all time high. Most American's knowledge of nature comes largely from watching television. The majority spend far more time texting than communing with the natural world and concerns about the economy rate far higher than environmental concerns in polls. I am eternally grateful that I was taught to love and respect the Earth even though observing the way that we degrade our natural world can be a very difficult thing to watch. An incredible array of colorful seaweeds washed up on the shore of Rockaway Beach Still, I find this planet to be so fabulous that it is my life's goal to explore as much of it as I can I'm able. One of the great tricks has been to balance the desire to be a vagabond with working and having a home and garden. Its one of the reasons I choose to work outside. I take the winters off when the garden is dormant and the weather inclement in Oregon. I've probably learned more traveling than I have doing everything else combined. Meteora, Greece What I have seen out there is nothing short of breath taking. Earth is covered in gems, many of them man made but the best being natural landscapes. We tend to completely alter the landscape to suit our needs, leaving no remnant of what was naturally there. I feel incredibly fortunate to be building this Labyrinth on a site surrounded by nature. I've returned to Bainbridge Island this time to complete the project. The Earth circuit is the one I chose to build as "the Community circuit," an idea suggested by my client to make the labyrinth more participatory. The idea was to have people bring stones and found objects that I would use to build the third circuit from the center. We made a nice sign explaining what I was looking for and people slowing started to leave stones. Since I've been back on the site this Spring a few more piles have appeared and the selection looks good. People have left collections of beach glass, geodes, an amethyst crystal, Ammonite fossils, a Tibetan lock, and oxidized metal spikes and nails from the days when ship building was a lucrative trade on the island. . An assortment of stones and other objects donated for the Community circuit I loaded the truck with my gear for the two final weeks of work and filled the gas tank (Saudi oil? Domestic Fracking? Tar Sands?) and got on that massive strip of traffic clogged pavement that is Interstate 5 and drove back to Bainbridge Island on April 15th. My biggest environmental sin is driving a fossil fueled vehicle over long distances, pumping greenhouse gases in to the atmosphere. Once I'm settled in here though I am staying just a minute from the site which makes for a very low carbon foot print commute. The night before I left Portland there was a full moon with a lunar eclipse that was dazzlingly visible from my back yard, with Mars shining red above it. It seems to be an auspicious time to resume work on the Labyrinth. Full Lunar Eclipse with Mars above and a bright star to the right I arrived on the island and drove first to Fay Bainbridge Park, which I hadn't been to before. There is a long wide beach backed by driftwood logs there. I combed it for small pebbles to use to make flower petals because in the Earth circuit I am celebrating the richness and fertility that is unique to the planet we live on. The beach at Fay Bainbridge Park When I arrived at the site I removed the forms from the work I left behind and began clearing the area that I'll be working in. A yard of crushed rock had been delivered to fill the gaps between the circuits but it doesn't match the nice gravel I was using before, so I am filling the gaps 2/3rds of the way and top dressing it with gravel that I'm scooping off the parking area up by the road, doubling the amount of work required for this step in the project. Somebody left a purple tulip on a boulder which I placed between the two white loops near the 'Clouds of Heaven' loops in the northerly direction of the Labyrinth and later buried in gravel. A purple tulip left at the Labyrinth This started the cycle of being tired and sore that will progress as I make my way to the end of the project. The pain in my shoulder had nearly gone away during my break, with the help of massage. My materials still hadn't been delivered the next day so I spent time setting up forms and sorting rock, and then went to Fort Ward Park to do some discrete beach combing. Fort Ward Beach It was a cold damp day so the beach stone was wet, showing off the colors. I gathered more small pebbles to use as flower petals and some larger stones in colors I am short on for the edges of the path. There are some interesting bedrock formations exposed along the Fort Ward beach that make circles surrounded by rings of thin layers, with the colorful beach stones filling the depressions. Soft bedrock formations at Fort Ward Beach It is arrangements like these that influence the way that I work. I'm always learning from Nature, who I consider the greatest teacher. My project manager Gregory picked up 8 bags of mortar for me as the delivery of a fresh pallet didn't happen that day. I mixed four bags and worked until dark, making time consuming little flowers with bits of green beach glass people had brought. I have to put them in on edge and they are quite small. They came out looking like Sea Anemones, which I like. I left a gap in the mosaic so that I can connect the Mars circuit to Earth circuit later. The spans between loops are getting shorter than the steel bands that I use for forms so I am having to work around that. I had new strips cut from a thinner gauge of steel because the bends are getting tighter and I need greater flexibility than the thicker steel strips I've been using will tolerate. The new strips are so thin that I have to use two of them sandwiched together to give them the rigidity to hold the shape of the curves. Green beach glass 'Sea AAnemones The next day I worked my way around to the western cardinal point, where I set a donated Ammonite fossil and made a couple more Sea Anemones using brown beer bottle beach glass. An Ammonite Fossil, brown beach glass 'Sea Anemones, and alabaster dice in the west of the Community circuit A woman named Ellen who lives below the park came up and brought me some wonderful pieces of oxidized metal her husband had collected from the beach, including nails with copper in them that have a nice green patina. Ellen The collection of beautiful old metal spikes, nails, and beach glass that Ellen's husband collected I worked until the rain made it too miserable to continue, so I went home to my place for lunch and was rewarded with a spectacular double rainbow that lasted for over an hour. I walked back to the site, taking in the vibrant damp greens of Spring and set things up for the next day. The weather is supposed to be drier tomorrow, so I will make good progress. Double Rainbow over Puget Sound In the morning I headed for the site earlier than usual. The sun was shining and that can be very motivating when you work outside. It was a beautiful day, with birds chirping, woodpeckers pecking, and me making mosaics. Some nice people came by and I gave them tours and made flowers for the ones who turned the Prayer Wheel. In the afternoon I finished the bends in the south from the Mars to the Earth circuit. Bends connecting the 4th to the 3rd circuit In the bend to the left I incorporated a Tibetan lock cast with the Bodhisattva Red Tara cast on the front and a lovely mandala that is now set permanently in mortar. I surrounded it with thin pink and red stones, including some beautiful metamorphic ones in the crown that I collected from a beach while I was in Greece. When I returned the next day a Madrone leaf had fallen and covered her, and I realized that it could be a great offense to devout Buddhists to have placed her in a position where she could be stepped on. I left the leaf covering her the rest of the time I worked on the mosaics as protection, and would like people to be mindful of her and to step around her, and to make a vow of loving compassion. Thanks. Red Tara A woman named Lyssa came by and asked if I would do a radio interview with the local access radio station. I talked to another woman, Catherine about having Monks from the island's monastery come to do a blessing and chant around it when it is finished. I've envisioned people sitting on each of the 12 boulders and joining in a focused chant. I would love to see people dance on it as well. Bring flowers to set in the gravel between the paths, or offerings to place at points you find special to you. There will eventually be a broom so you can sweep it. There are thousands of details to be found if you seek them out. Walking this labyrinth is meant to be a fascinating journey in Time and Space. I worked from the point I stopped at yesterday, setting the Community circuit from the Western cardinal point to where a pair of bends will occur connecting to the 2nd circuit, the Venus circuit. In the area with orange stone I placed a copy of the Phaistos Disk, which I bought when I was on the island of Crete in Greece this winter. The original disk was found in the Minoan palace complex at Phaistos and is twice the size of the copy I bought. It is considered to be the oldest known example of typography. Carved seals were stamped into a wet clay tablet in a spiraling line but the text has never been deciphered. Countless copies in a variety of colors were produced for the souvenir market. I chose one that mimicked the original. Surrounding the disk I set bits of red grout from the palace site and pottery shards from the Minoan palace at Knossos. I added to the mix some alabaster dice making the numbers 7 and 11 along with small orange beach pebbles, creating a quirky flower. A copy of the Phaistos Disk From orange area I worked my way in to black stones and then white where the bends to the Venus circuit will be connected later. There is plenty of rain the forecast, making Spring on Puget Sound lush and vibrantly green. One of the best parts of this project is when I visit area beaches to collect stones. I needed to go to town and buy more rebar so I stopped at a beach at low tide on Eagle Harbor where the town of Winslow is located. The selection here is limited but I can always use small stones, and I want to use material from as many of the island's beaches as possible. A beach on Eagle Harbor Connecting Eagle Harbor to Rockaway beach where I collect most of my stone is Creosote Point. This was once a major facility for treating wood with coal tar as a preservative for making power poles and pilings for docks. The plant operated for 80 years until environmental concerns forced its closure. The contaminated site was designated a Superfund site by the government and efforts to contain the contamination continue to this day. There is a large steel wall enclosing the site and the water here is a murky brown color. There is a park along the shoreline outside the steel walls, which is covered with barnacles and small mussels at the tide line. The beach at Creosote Point I found two beautiful big moon snail shells on the beach that are as large as a small fist. I later filled one with mortar and placed it in a bend in the Community circuit. The next day was Easter Sunday and the weather was beautiful (God smiling on egg hunts). I went down to the Labyrinth and set up the forms looping to the Venus circuit. A woman named Helen came down and asked if I had found a ceramic heart she had left in a small bag on the boulder where stones were left for the Community circuit. I told her I had taken it home to figure out a way to install it so that it wouldn't fall out later because it is very thin. It was a meant as a memorial to her young son who had passed away. Our conversation was so sweet and tender and one of those moments that makes this project so special. After that I went to a lovely brunch given by my hosts for their family. They all came to visit the Labyrinth and then Deborah Cheadle, who I met yesterday came to take me over to the country club to collect stones on the beautiful beaches that surround this exclusive point on the island. This is an area of stately old homes with marvelous views across a pasture like golf course. We sat in the sun and picked small colorful stones and visited through the afternoon. I learned a lot about island history and got to see some fine homes and gardens on this glorious day. Bainbridge Island is an incredibly beautiful place to live. Bainbridge Reef by the Country Club Then I returned and built the loop connecting the Earth circuit to the Venus circuit. A couple came as it was getting dark, their first visit to the park. They said they would bring me some stones as their last name is Rockefeller. The colorful pebbles Deborah and I collected on the beach by the Country Club I finished the Community circuit when I built the loops in the white northerly direction that connect it to the Venus circuit. These loops are special in that I incorporated Helen's ceramic heart dedicated to her son. I set some geodes that belonged to a man who passed away who's name I do not know, and made petals with bits of donated beach glass and ceramic crockery, and stones given to me by a couple who's dog Reilly had just passed away. I surrounded all of this with special bits of marble I gathered in Greece from the Temples of Dionysos, Demeter, the Delian Apollo, the Temple of Hera on Samos, and the ruins of a Hellenistic house on the island of Paros, and a stone I brought back from Pompeii 4 years ago. Please tread lightly when you walk on these delicate turns in the path. Another circuit done, in honor of the incredible planet on which we live. May we honor it and treat it with love so that it may continue to sustain us. That is my wish. Thank you to the people who brought stones and meaningful object used to create it, and thank you for reading my ramblings, Jeffrey

Оригинал взят у khulinich в Мозаика в интерьере и не только. Вот за что люблю мозаику, так это за то, что при создании работы использовать можно какие-угодно материалы - от классической смальты (мозаичного стекла) и мозаичной плитки до яичной скорлупы и CD-дисков, а в промежутках - керамическая…

I'm not sure when I first became fascinated by mosaic pavings. Perhaps it was while looking at photos of the ancient Roman villa fl...