Chihuly Glass at the Desert Botanical Gardens

I'm as much of an art fan as I am a garden/plant fan, though modern stuff is less appealing to me in general. But, enough people said the Chihuly Glass exhibit at the Phoenix/Scottsdale Desert Botanical Gardens couldn't be missed that I decided to give it a look.

Boy, were they right.

My hosts assured me that going to an outdoor garden exhibit at night was not as absurd as it sounded--apparently, they lit the glass up at night. What I didn't realize until I got there was that in many cases that meant "like a light bulb", not just a spotlight on the chunk'o'glass. The exhibit was spectacular. It might have helped a lot that I'm a huge fan of science fiction, and frankly, most of it looked like the artist was going for renditions of the latest alien landscape...especially when put against the backdrop of the amazing cacti specimens the botanical garden has on display. We got there at dusk, and stayed until they started roping off the footpaths.

In many cases, the "art" was almost indistinguishable from some of the plants--here's a daytime/nighttime shot of the same piece as an example:

And this was just a cool shot of a cactus (no glass) that I took as it started to rain:


And here's some of the other stuff we enjoyed [more to follow...this takes a LOOONG time to upload images]: