March 1^st and in three more weeks spring will arrive. I know I am rushing it with this verdant green garden sculpture, but tomorrow’s forecast is another three inches of snow. We in the North East are up to our ears, no correction, over our heads, with the white stuff and feel it will take the entire month of March for our white covered ground to return to green. So that today we are taking our attention off white and thinking only green by honoring a bit of amazing topiary, an ode to spring with Earth Goddess. It is the largest sculpture in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens towering over twenty-five feet tall and is assembled from twenty-three sections, each weighing twenty-five thousand pounds for a total weight of nearly twenty-nine tons. Earth Goddess emerges from the ground, stuffed with forty thousand annuals at the Cascades Gardens section of the botanical gardens.

The Earth Goddess is a living, sophisticated evolution of the traditional “stuffed topiary” technique. Thousands of meticulously groomed annuals are planted into soil-and-sphagnum moss filled netting covering the steel forms – hidden works of artisanship themselves – to carpet the skeletons in colorful patterns. Complex irrigation systems beneath the surface of the sculptures allow the plants to grow – and the creatures to flourish – in Atlanta’s summer heat.

We invoke the Earth Goddess to please hasten the warmer weather where we mere mortals can enjoy the return of the tulips and daffodils and as the season progress complain about the heat.