Blooming this week in the shadow of an abstract bronze sculpture at the North Carolina Museum of Art is an undulating five-pointed star of golden daffodils, twinkling with purple alliums.
The garden, designed by NC State University’s Julieta Trevino Sherk, came together Monday April 4 as students in her construction landscape design class worked alongside volunteers and professionals from Myatt Landscape Concepts. Together, they planted 2,000 daffodils, 400 alliums – or ornamental onions – along with sod and hostas in the bed that surrounds Henry Moore’s ‘Spindle Piece’ sculpture between the museum’s old and new buildings.
The garden – as striking as Henri Matisse’s cut-outs in its shape, color and contrast – was part of Art in Bloom, the museum’s annual festival of art and flowers, held April 7 to 10.
The museum asked for NC State’s help with the festival two years ago, and that’s when Sherk, a landscape architect and Associate Professor of Horticultural Science, decided to take on what she considered a substantial challenge – creating something spectacular that would be in peak bloom precisely for the week of a festival.