While in the USA in last month, we had a lovely visit to the Denver Botanic Gardens, where our daughter Anna works.   Until November 30th there’s a fabulous array of Chihuly’s glass pieces installed in amongst the garden plantings.  The gardens were at their full height of summer colour, and most of the works were quite organic, and very in tune with the plants that surrounded them.  To see some of the images, go here  http://tinyurl.com/o6pw4xf     They say that by the time it closes, over 6 months it will have brought an extra 3 million visitors to DBG !  On the strength of this we avoided the one weekend available and instead chose  our last day, a monday, to visit – not realizing that this was a free entry day!  And, so there were crowds of people moving around the gardens, anyway!!!  But, despite the large number of people, the crowd was nicely behaved and mostly not too pressing.

So many of the installations were set in some of the delightful water features in the gardens, and this one above with forms in different greens with white and silver highlights, was possibly my favourite.  Green has always been my favourite colour.

Denver has a record of dramatic and fierce summer storms, and one year during the time we were living there our roof was pulverised by golfball-sized hail stones, so naturally I wondered out loud about insurance.   Each installation is  a mass of organic shapes attached at one end to a central form.  The glass is quite thick and strong, but if something does get broken, that module is just removed and replaced with another.  I imagine there’s a storage area somewhere in the grounds with lots of bits of coloured glass shapes sitting around on shelves, waiting …