Posted on by mark

After the marathon, we escaped Tokyo to the mountain town of Hakone and soaked in an onsen. This fake tree didn’t care if it was raining or not. It had glass droplets.

Posted on by mark

At the end of our trip to Japan we made a quick stop at the Kenrokuen Garden, one of the few places on the planet that successfully combines all six elements of excellent gardens as defined in the classic Chinese text, Rakuyo-Meienki: spaciousness, seclusion, watercourses, antiquity, panoramas, and artifice. Yep, artifice.

From the pamphlet, artifice was defined as, “Ponds, streams, famous trees, mountain views integrated with the garden, a valley in the mountains that suddenly appears, etc. all considered and created by human skills. Other types of human skills are the skills of Kenrokuen’s gardeners, who have been caring for the garden for a long time, refining its beauty while making use of techniques passed down from generation to generation. . .”

Then I spotted them, the gardeners, the great masters of fake nature. I bowed in respect.

Posted on by mark

Here is the hotel where we stayed on our third night in NZ, a place called Bag End. It was kind of dump, to be honest. I kept hitting my head and the bed was too short. Then we had an infestation of dwarves.

The oak tree above Bag End is actually fake! Apparently the original died between Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, so Peter Jackson had it recreated out of fiberglass, using silk for the leaves and wiring them to the branches. Love it!

Posted on by mark

Even a fake-nature photographer knows that it’s fun to shoot tall skinny trees from a worm’s eye view. The tree on the left is a real ponderosa pine that I shot a few months back at Mt. Lemmon. And the one on the right is a fake pine tree in the Seoul airport. Pretty awesome, Korea!