Last weekend we visisted Cornerstone Festival of Gardens in Sonoma (part of the wine country, just north of San Francisco). For an admission charge of $9.00, visitors can explore a fascinating range of garden/art exhibit/environment/installations created by landscape architects, design firms, artists, and more.

It's not quite like visiting purty gardens somewhere, nor walking through a gallery or a museum. The installations engage many of the senses in some interesting and powerful ways.

"Break out" is a maze of screen doors in a "room" of hay bales, while Johnny Cash music plays on several speakers (out of sync) - you get the slamming screen doors, tinny music and smell of hay.

"The Lullalby Garden" looks like sand dunes in the distance, playing an interesting game of scale, and as you take your shoes off and stroll on the small hills (covered in many mats of plastic fiber woven by Vietnamese villagers) you may feel as a giant. The visual expectation of texture and scale is confounded by the experience, and the detailed story of handicrafts from far-off lands are jumbled together to create a whole new story.

"Daisy Border" is simply a series of fields of blowing flower pinwheels.

Daisy Border



"Rise" is a corrugated metal sewage tube that separates two zones with contrasting foliage on either side, and as you walk through the tube you experience the world you left behind, and the world ahead of you through the portal of the end of the tube, while sound folds in around you.

Rise




Rise





"Changing Rooms" is a winding path to a curtain covered round space. Along the way are stations where you can use a Sharpie to write a wish on a translucent disc, but it's not until you enter the inner "room" that you understand what the wishes are for - a changing scuplture built from the words and wishes of visitors.

Changing Rooms




Changing Rooms







Changing Rooms







Changing Rooms




Changing Rooms






"Earth Walk" is an incredibly simple concept - a wedge cut into the ground, creating two ramps on either side on which you can descend about 8 feet below ground level. Surrounded by haybales, you feel even deeper. As you walk down the ramp the environmental sound gradually recedes until you feel a moist hush. At the bottom, then is a contemplative water garden.

Earth Walk



"Eucalyptus Soliloquy" takes tree leaves and attaches them with various densities to metal mesh walls, creating different spaces that let pass through in different ways, with the visual texture of the drying leaves behind mesh adding another layer.

Eucalyptus Soliloquy



"A Small Tribute to Migrant Workers" tells a story in literal and symbolic ways - one part of the display dangles printed profiles of immigrants who have come to the US to work, their financial situation, their history, their families and more, putting faces and names to a complex social issue. Elsewhere in the garden you can do some gardening, tending to plants with tools provideded, or briefly recreate a symbolic border crossing across shards of broken plant pots.

A Small Tribute to Migrant Workers



"Blue Tree" is the most iconic of the Cornerstone Gardens - a (dying?) tree is completed covered with plastic blue ornaments - the effect is fantastic, your eye sees a real tree, but almost none of the texture of a real tree is visible, so your brain questions the legitimacy of what you're seeing. A range of perspectives gives many different takes on the tree, from being in a surrealistic painting to playing with a giant molecular modelling kit.

Blue Tree




Blue Tree



It's worth checking out if you are in the area. These are all sensory experiences, and words/photos (click to enlarge, by the way) certainly don't do it justice.