Parc del Laberint d'Horta

Last week I spent a sunny morning in the Parc del Laberint d'Horta named after its impressive cypress maze. Emitting a sense of abandonment, with its main building partly in ruins, and offering treats as the topiary garden, the romantic creek, the island of love, the camellia garden and the false cemetery it's a wonderful place to lose yourself.

Tree house hamper

Image: Etsy

The thought of a house in a tree is always tickling. Jenna Fenwick has hand screen printed her illustration with non-toxic water based pigments on organic fabric and made a hamper, now for sale on Etsy.

Come out and play

Original images: Come Out And Play, Movium 

Finding it hard to overlook the resemblance between the grid pattern of the streets surrounding Washington Park Square and a Pac Man game plan Mattia Romeo and Gregory Trefry initiated a human version of the game calling it Pac Manhattan in 2004. (Gregory Trefry is also one of the presenters at the upcoming Movium Winter Conference I posted about here.) This came to be the starting point of the annual festival Come Out And Play offering play and games in the city streets, squares and parks with its inhabitants as participants.

The festival, every year growing and every year moving to a new location to attract new kinds of people, wants to provide a forum for new types of public games and for the participants to play and interact with their city while experiencing a sense of belonging and a strengthening in their relationship with the city and its public spaces.

Via Movium.

Iron Wire Tree

Image: Signerat

This tangled tree made of iron wire by Arnfridsson Art and Steel makes me think of fanciful fairy tales and old secret gardens. It can be bought at Signerat.

Jardí Botànic de Barcelona

Yesterday I paid a visit to the Barcelona Botanical Garden located on the northwestern slopes of Montjuïc. The area, between the 1940s and 1970s home to a vast shantytown known as Can Valero and later the site of a landfill, is now a lush 14-hectare garden displaying a representative sample of flora from the areas of the world with a mediterranean climate, i.e. Australia, Chile, California, South Africa and The Mediterranean Basin.

The garden, designed by a team of architects, horticulturalists, biologists and landscape architect Bet Figueras, is covered by an unstructured grid of situ concrete paths adapted to the topography of the area creating organized spaces for the plant communities.

Opened in 1999, the Barcelona Botanical Garden has a very contemporary feel and the objectives to help preserve threatened plant species and raise public awareness about nature and the importance of biodiversity.

The winter being a period of rest for the aerial parts of the plants, I can't wait to come back in time for the spring rains.