road trip

[greenoak]

:cool: a good road trip is always good and inspiring to me...... today we went to the chicago botanical gardens art and antiques show.... it was beautiful and full of wonderful antiques and displays... all kinds of old garden statues, fountains, cement, paintings, beautiful flower pictures of all kinds....tons of iron, old and new..


one of my customers had a georgous booth.... all green and white....big glass top table with big shabby white corbels he got from us for legs and our pictures.... he was swamped....and happy...also a deer skull with flowers sticking out of the earholes.... ...


i was so impressed with the displays...bunny williams had a booth... most of the stuff i liked was in the thousands..i didnt buy anything...... the box lunch was 42$ for dh and i.....


a good day...

ann of greenoak

www.greenoakantiques.com

[zuzus_garden]

Bunny Williams from Treillage? Wow - sounds like you had an amazing day!

[greenoak]

it was neat zuzu....they had hand colored botanical prints from every era ...even the 1500s.....i kind of collect that...mostly from the mid 1800s..
the craziest thing i saw was a framed pair of an old dessicated bug collection , for 800$....there were many huge things i loved like 8 ft cement maidens and a truly wild funny wood lion life size..and lots of tramp art which i collect...


bunnys booth was awesome....but not as neat as last year, when she had a cement dog from england for thousands either 4 or 7 i forget....they always give her a prime spot....she always has something huge..she wasnt in the booth when i came by...i love her books ...her guy?? has shopped with my customer who set up there ...so possibly something from here could have ended up in her store...


there was a fun shabby booth with several 1910 era flower paintings... and old planter boxes with big tulip trellises behind them... my friend almost bought an old 600$ cement frog fountain there...

the set ups were so dramatic and artistic.... i learn a lot just seeing their beautiful examples... hard for me here because i have so much little stuff...i cant really do the gallery effect...i do have giant urns and forsythia bushes tho... and they made 8 ft displays out of that...table + urn+ forsythia....pretty basic...



and denial....saw lots of flower pins.... including some beaded ones for 12$ .. but lots of girls were wearing them.... mostly big single silk otr cloth flowers...

it was fun
ann

[zuzus_garden]

I would have loved to have seen it, especially the displays and garden statuary.

Those bugs must have been from an old and important private collection. I've visited sites online that house the original butterflies used to make the classifications, and you can barely tell what they are anymore.

I love garden shops like Treillage, Grasmere Design, Le Jardin Blanc and Wiggy Flowers. Would love to hear if anyone knows of other online garden shops with European designs.

You are so lucky to have gone, Ann!

[greenoak]

the bugs were boring and they gave no provenence..... i think the dealers sometimes think its a rich crowd and they can try anything......or maybe they heard bugs were good and went nuts at an auction....
they were teeny and beige ...no butterflys etc...

ann

[Kathy Ann]

I wonder, if I had lived back then, would I have also thought the way to honor something was to kill it and bring it home? I hope not! Then again I also think the world will run out of oil. And granite. But those are different issues.

We did a house tour in Dover, New Hampshire, where the collector had a lot of bugs, dozens of birds, some mammals and some tropical fish specimens. I guess the fish started to fade pretty quickly because he painted them with tempura. They were so ugly!