Plants Make Places
As we begin our next move from a garden-oriented house in Princeton where we have spent most of the past 20 years, to a new apartment in New York City, I am thinking about strategies to keep some of the verdure in view.
Plants make places. They create settings for life to happen. They cool and they calm.
While scouting for inspirations about how to green things up in the apartment without moving all of our container houseplants, I re-discovered Tsubaki Tokyo.
Tsubaki was established in 2014 by Keishi Miyahara and Ikuko Yamashita in pursuit of "instilling a fundamental experience of nature in an urban milieu." They design for every type of environment from public housing to retail interiors for international fashion brands.
Tsubaki’s shokubutsu installations are beautiful to the eye without requiring any explanation.
Miyahara and Yamashita achieve this effect by being studiously observant. They apply their craft thoughtfully so that each piece is carefully attuned to its place and time. They are motivated by three basic principles - people, plants and circumstance.
Although they are most-known for their indoor biotopes, my favorites are the large-format botanical arrangements. These are curated to reflect their space and season with great precision. And come in beautiful fired-clay containers unique to each one.
Miyahara and Yamashita work regularly with container-making ceramicist Kazunori Hamana and magazine photographer Tetsuya Ito to bring-together and share the experiences.
The example above is called "picked weeds" and is inspired by the idea that weeds inhabit the niches of a city. It combines invasive species like goldenrod, plume poppy, barnyard millet, kiwi vines, and contains them into a wabi-sabi still life. In Ito’s photograph, the arrangement takes a shabby interior space and makes it into a beautiful moment and memory.
Look here for more examples on Tsubaki’s work on the web and Instagram:
