April 2026

April no showers. We spent a lot of time watering the garden.

Sometimes we just can’t be assed hauling out to the bush for walking and, when struck with the type of ennui that requires a green solution, we head to the local Botanical Gardens. Hobart has a corker and our favourite spot is the Japanese garden.

This garden is worth contemplating for a couple of reasons, the first being that it was designed and executed for the purposes of contemplation and does a very good job of providing the necessities of said state. As a great example of ‘garden as an aide memoire’ we were standing on the walkway over the pond when a text message arrived to tell us that our great niece Órla had been born and now every time we stand in that spot someone will say “This is where we were when we heard that Órla had been born”

The second reason for contemplation is that this garden is a living embodiment of what happened when people everywhere worked to rebuild relationships between countries and cultures in the aftermath of the second world war. Bridges were built and crimes forgiven and it was hard work because everyone had behaved very badly and everyone was very angry and sad. Our Japanese garden was ​​designed by Kanjiro Harada, a landscape architect from Yaizu, Hobart's sister city in Japan. It’s of its time and is wildly kitch by today’s standards and all the more perfect for that. Children adore it and if you are visiting Hobart we recommend a day out in the gardens. You can walk there through the domain if you’re a walker or there is usually parking near bye. You can read some more about the sister cities idea from which this garden has flowered here.

The little wooden corner platform is where we think about Órla.

Interior April. We have to confess that this job is taking longer than we would have liked.. however.. The windows are in, the trim is sanded, painted and installed and all that is left is a final coat of paint and a tricky cut to measure piece for the far right hand side. To break the monotony a bit we’ve started on the wall at the other end. This wall has a lovely log cabin door frame and handmade sliding doors with real plate glass. We are really standing on the shoulders of giants here and it makes the whole project doubly rewarding. We have included a shot of the handmade light fittings that are waiting a refurb. They will be reinstalled on the outside eave once they are finished. Wu factor 10/10

So much trim all cut to size..

rgbDesigner April. This month’s palette is called Barbara1 because it has colours drawn from the works of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Some of these colours have informed our recent interior work as will be obvious. rgbDesigner does not use AI in the form of a LLM and is more like a synthesiser for colour with a large number of settings that can be combined to produce palettes, gradients and generated images. It works, like many of the best things, by math. First we have the palette, and then the gradient. Following that we’ve produced a couple of offset square images and some brushed background. Many things that look like ‘art’ are not art but these images are not ‘art’ but look like art. If you catch our drift ;)

Barbara was also big on green

You can buy rgbDesigner on the Apple AppStore here. Designed for iPad

Writing April. Rob Gowty, our resident scribe had an unexpected turning in the road when his Medium crew became enamoured of the out takes he posts when he produces AI images for his cucumber man stories. ( do not bang on at us about AI please. We use all the tools in the toolbox and cucumber man’s story is inherently the story of AI and the future ) We’ve included some cucumber man images below so you can see the evolution. A point of interest is that he appears to have ‘trained’ the AI (DALL-E 3) over time and has begun to see an endearing consistency in the images it produces for him. When they stop supporting DALL-E 3, Cucumber Man will be gone like an AI partner who has been removed from the AppStore.

You can read some Cucumber Man stories here. They are paywalled but they are also so short you can read them anyway.

Cucumber Man’s evolution from corporate meltdown to bespoke obsessive.

Our book of the month is an audio production of Star Wars CATACLYSM by Lydia Kang. Here it is on the Apple book store but it’s widely available and will most likely be at your library. Listening to this book whilst undertaking mundane chores will gift you an insight into the mind of The United States Secretary of ‘War’ who was clearly raised on this stuff. Portentous. Driven by an excess of emotion and belief.

Lydia Kang nails it. Do you think this is her real name or a pen name? It’s very on brand.

May the force be with you.