Image of the day – 14

Any creative work seems quite magical, as what was only in the creator’s mind appears in actuality and can be seen and touched.

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What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.

I’m posting an image every day (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.

Here’s another view of the gardens at Hidcote. Lawrence Johnston designed Hidcote with the concept of ‘garden rooms’, one of which is the focus of this photo. Walking through the Hidcote garden you pass from one room to another, to another repeatedly. There are constant surprises every time you turn a corner or pass through an opening in a hedge. It’s delightful.

I love this kind of garden and I think you might too, if you ever have a chance to visit Hidcote – take it!

This, to me, says something about the nature of creation in general. There’s a design stage during which the idea of ‘rooms’ is a foundational step, and even some of the layout, or even most of it, take shape in the designer’s imagination. And almost always there’s a second stage after things start to be laid out on the ground (for a garden). In this second stage, it may become clear that improvements are possible once you see the ‘lay of the land’. Little tweaks and changes can improve the design significantly.

But always, in any creative work, something comes into existence that was simply not there before. Any creative work seems quite magical, as what was only in the creator’s mind appears in actuality and can be seen and touched, or in the case of a garden – walked in and admired.

Themed image collections

The links below will take you to the first post in each collection

Cirencester, Favourites, Irish holiday 2024, Roman villa

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The snowflake designer

I’ve always been interested in their symmetry, their beautiful shapes, and their infinite variety

Since I first saw a photograph of a snowflake under the microscope, I’ve always been interested in their symmetry, their beautiful shapes, and their infinite variety. But never had I imagined that it would be possible to create such snowflakes in the lab or control their growth to order.

Meet Ken Libbrecht, the snowflake guy. He began by investigating how they form, and can now build snowflakes more or less to order. Amazing! Watch this video in which Ken demonstrates his work to Derek Muller on Veritasium.

Ken has discovered so much about the conditions that cause snowflakes to form. He also understands the subtleties of humidity, temperature and so on that produce different kinds of snowflake growth, why they show the six-fold radial symmetry that they do, why they branch at particular places, and why individual ‘arms’ of a snowflake are almost identical to one another while different snowflakes are unique.

See also