#landscape

#landscape

It isn't just McEwan's elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the infinite shingle of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth,

Undulating in a Utah Museum of Fine Arts gallery, thousands of glimmering casts seem to float throughout the space. For his large-scale installation "Stone on Boundary," Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi has suspended 5,000 copper foils that he molded over river rocks in both Osaka and Salt Lake City. Begun in the artist's studio in Osaka-a city where Japanese copper has been refined for export for around two centuries-the installation then traveled to the museum, which sits less than an hour's drive from the world's largest operational open-pit copper mine.

Artworks inspired by chess boards, landscapes, and nature by Sydney-based artist Sasha Krautman. Chess is a game filled with contrast, order, mystery, luck, and fate. For Krautman, there's a lot of symbolism to be found in one game, even in one simple black and white pattern. Her collection consists of 12 chess board-style art pieces, each bringing together 2 images that simultaneously oppose and fulfill the other.

The elliptical lotus pool of Tadao Ando's Honpukuji Temple (Temple of Water) was built in 1991. The upper level is open-air and roofless, while the circular vermilion sanctuary with its Buddha statue lies underneath the pool, accessible by a staircase that bisects the lotus ellipse.' Photograph: Will Aitken A squacco heron spears a fish in the river between Namibia and Botswana.' Photograph: Barry Thomas

The question arising in the office is what initial equipment is needed to start gardening, with the wheelbarrow being the suggested essential tool.