This garden is across the center path from the Sensuous Garden. It has several good elements, a strong theme, and a few "what were they thinking?!" bits. The theme was "garden for a ceramics artist", and ceramic art appeared throughout the garden along with a potter's wheel and other ceramic-related items. The bits I didn't like were the overly-cutesy frog and lilypads (ceramic) floating in the ponds, and the driveway. Complete with pickup truck. I'm still wondering why they decided to do that.

Following the path past the potter's garden to the left, you see a small garden into which has been tucked a patio in the shape of a quarter circle. I liked this one, in part because it echoed the design I used in my graphics class final project, and partly for the moat. It's hard to see the moat in this photo as they're installing a liner for it, but around the top of the steps is a moat with tile steps "floating" in it. Wayne felt the arbor "needed something"--more cross pieces perhaps, or a second circle around it.

Continuing on around the island, we pass the colonnade garden on our left before coming to a small rectangular garden. This garden is nondescript; the only distinguishing feature about it is its use of broken concrete for short walls and real used brick (as opposed to fake used brick--there IS such a thing) on the patio.

Finally, before returning to the potter's studio, we reach a garden I never warmed up to. We called it the pistachio ice cream garden due to the color of the walls, though the picket fence was more of a bright primary school green. A garden usually has so much green just in the plant material that painting something green is just tilting the color balance too far to me (this despite owning a green house...but our house is a greyed down sage green that goes well with plant foliage and doesn't demand attention like the fence green does). From what I observed and heard, the designer seems to be a driven, Type A perfectionist who doesn't seem to be having any fun doing this; I have to wonder why she bothers if it isn't fun to her. Whether it was from Mark singing "Euphorbia" or Dan goofing off pretending to fly the kite before setting the kite string in place, I always felt that our group was enjoying ourselves. I certainly did.

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