KAREN GOLLAND
Mad Honey
During the year of my birth, not far from where I was born, a famous gardener mapped a new terrain. The garden he designed meticulously copied another garden from a land far away, which in turn replicated the landforms of a country, albeit in miniature. This Japanese Garden still exists, some forty years later, in the Central West town of Cowra. The two aspects feel worlds apart; one is dry and scrubby, the other manicured and green. If you visit the garden in early spring, you'll enter the town by travelling through canola crops. Yellow flowers carpet the hills, creating iridescent fields of human-made gold. These plants are relative newcomers to the region, and the experience is visually intoxicating and strangely unsettling.
Like the plants manicured for strolling gardens or modified for rural landscapes, the Mad Honey garden has grown from other places. The radiant clusters replicate a garden I discovered while using google earth to travel through Japan. Exclusively planted from azaleas and rhododendrons, each carefully clipped plant in this garden took the shape of a giant neon boulder. The result was otherworldly, and when I googled these plants, I discovered that some are toxic, containing grayanotoxin; and the honey that bees make from this nectar is called Mad Honey. It's rarely lethal in humans but can cause hallucinations. I was virtually tripping. Now handcrafted entirely out of the nylon knitting ribbon and synthetic wools, this human-made crop of psychotropic botanicals enchants, while also provoking a deep ambivalent unease. Pulsing quietly in Deep Space, the Mad Honey garden reminds us that things aren't always what they seem.
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