First there is form, then limit

In his 1958 Creative Gardens, James Rose writes: "I have found it helpful to think of a garden as sculpture, not sculpture in the sense of an ordinary object to be viewed. But sculpture that is large enough and perforated enough to walk through. And open enough to present no barrier to movement, and broken enough to guide the experience, which is essentially a communion with the sky."

While they are certainly more than ordinary objects, as objects palms--with all their vivid structural presence and often unexpected asymmetry--certainly achieve the sculptural. In the built landscape, they also participate in and contribute to Rose's sense of sculptural space, defining permeable vertical limits with line but also texture. Some communion with the sky is by corrugation.