I had a chance to visit the Better Homes and Gardens demonstration gardens in downtown Des Moines today. The gardens are a part of the former Meredith campus (now Dotdash Meredith) where the magazines shoot garden features and so on. The gardens, being commercial working space, only admits visitors a couple of hours weekly, on Fridays. The various parts of the demonstrations include microclimates of sun and shade, areas displaying garden designs and even small vegetable areas.
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| "Japanese Maple," watercolor and ink on paper |
Today the Japanese maples at the northern end of the gardens were spectacular. At midday the sun catches the tops of the impossibly-red foliage so that it seems to glow with an inner fire. I sat on a bench in the sun and sketched one of the maples. It's probably thirty years old, with gracefully branching limbs and twigs below and that bright red umbrella above.
There is simply no way that dull pigments can reproduce the exhilarating, almost neon color of these trees. The best I could do was indicate it.
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