I’m sure many balancers have a history and progression through their own styles of balancing… Something that has contributed heavily to my own skill and style is the creation of numerous large to small gardens of rocks.. Many of my early gardens have less intricate balances, but more numerous “communities.” Creating so many gardens like this has logged 100’s if not 1000’s of hours of practice and experience… different locations, different weather conditions, different skill levels, different times of day…different occasions…. Rock after rock after rock for all those gardens has become essentially countless… the fun element of Garden building is the introduction of a more comprehensive dimension of overall design.  No right or wrong. just personal flavor.

Plotting gardens across 3 dimensions involves a little bit more contemplation blended with a certain “flow”.  Usually I pay more attention to height and field distribution as a whole…beginning with the tallest “nodes” and filling in appropriate spaces with a spectrum of shorter balances… there are 2 or 3 gardens I plotted according to a specific camera view.  But the rest were purely designed for variant 3 dimensional observation of space…   The exciting thing about gardens is the collective energy all the different balances combine into…  Even if the individuals are not as technical, the energy still flows strong with a variety of layouts.  Normally the photos end up capturing the most energetic angle of the garden… taking into account landscape, rock shapes… node distribution… light.. time…everything… It seems as if many beginning balancers will focus on one balance at a time with overly ambitious goals… My advice is try getting into a simple flow with less thinking and just start erecting less specialized balances wherever your intuition calls.  After all, Garden creation is an essential skill for performing the art (in my opinion)… not as essential for personal pleasure. Though, balance is good to consider in multiple dimensions… ;)

As practice and experience grows, so does intuition and technical ability…

42 Responses
  1. Tyisha Passaro

    The first tropical gardens and concrete water fountains were thought to be in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia but they were designed for medicinal purposes rather than for ornamental purposes. Never the less, the Egyptians certainly loved their public concrete water fountains. These concrete water fountains were also used in their tropical gardens. The Egyptians had a large natural supply of burnt wood and limestone chalk for making their concrete. In fact, the Great pyramids may have been made from limestone concrete blocks.’

    My own website

  2. Of all the stunning pics that you have posted I keep coming back to this one … I think this one is my favorite. All of the pics you posted have their own element of beauty and are quite breath taking in their own way with the colors , textures and different back ground views and i can appreciate all of them… but something about this one with the multiple pillars of stone delicately stacked surrounded by the flowing water and the green of the trees takes my breath away … It looks like a beautiful garden, I’m sure the energy that comes from standing in this spot is incredible

  3. barb

    wow, love these gardens. Thanks so much for sharing this kind of information, as a newbie stacker I appreciate insights into the craft, how to etc.

  4. Marit

    I love the first and the last one on the bottom row. Have you ever thought of selling them as posters? I think they’re gorgeous!

  5. I love this because rocks are the whispers of our souls…past and present…They reflect who we are, how far we have come and where we are headed. Thank you Michael Grab for your inspiration and dedication to beauty through nature…♥

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