Real Garden Research Articles

A multi-modal garden dataset and hybrid 3D dense reconstruction framework based on panoramic stereo images for a trimming robot

Recovering an outdoor environment’s surface mesh is vital for an agricultural robot during task planning and remote visualization. Image-based dense 3D reconstruction is sensitive to large movements between adjacent frames and the quality of the estimated depth maps. Our proposed solution for these problems is based on a newly-designed panoramic stereo camera along with a hybrid novel software framework that consists of three fusion modules: disparity fusion, pose fusion, and volumetric fusion. The panoramic stereo camera with a pentagon shape consists of 5 stereo vision camera pairs to stream synchronized panoramic stereo images for the following three fusion modules. In the disparity fusion module, rectified stereo images produce the initial disparity maps using multiple stereo vision algorithms. Then, these initial disparity maps, along with the intensity images, are input into a disparity fusion network to produce refined disparity maps. Next, the refined disparity maps are converted into full-view (360°) point clouds or single-view (72°) point clouds for the pose fusion module. The pose fusion module adopts a two-stage global-coarse-to-local-fine strategy. In the first stage, each pair of full-view point clouds is registered by a global point cloud matching algorithm to estimate the transformation for a global pose graph’s edge, which effectively implements loop closure. In the second stage, a local point cloud matching algorithm is used to match single-view point clouds in different nodes. Next, we locally refine the poses of all corresponding edges in the global pose graph using three proposed rules, thus constructing a refined pose graph. The refined pose graph is optimized to produce a global pose trajectory for volumetric fusion. In the volumetric fusion module, the global poses of all the nodes are used to integrate the single-view point clouds into the volume to produce the mesh of the whole garden. The proposed framework and its three fusion modules are tested on a real outdoor garden dataset to show the superiority of the performance. The whole pipeline takes about 4 min on a desktop computer to process the real garden dataset, which is available at: https://github.com/Canpu999/Trimbot-Wageningen-SLAM-Dataset.

Navigation ability in young, middle-aged and older adults: Different domains of knowledge and their relationship with visuospatial factors

Spatial navigation skills used in daily life are liable to decline with aging. They rely on a knowledge of landmarks, their locations (from egocentric and allocentric perspectives) and paths (learned in route and survey modes). This study investigated this knowledge in young, middle-aged and older people, also considering the role of individual visuospatial factors. Eighty-seven people in three age groups (20–30, 55–64, 65–75 years) were assessed on their visuospatial factors, and learned a path by walking in a real garden. Then their knowledge of landmarks (recognition task) and their positions (egocentric and allocentric pointing tasks), and the path (route repetition, order of landmarks, path finding and map drawing tasks) was tested. After controlling for sex and years of education, middle-aged and older adults performed similarly, and less well than young adults in allocentric pointing and map drawing tasks. Visuospatial working memory and sense of direction were the most influential individual factors, with specificity for each knowledge domain. In conclusion, the ability to use mental representations of environments learned from navigation relates to the domain of knowledge involved, age, and individual visuospatial factors.

Evaluation of a boxwood topiary trimming robot

This paper describes a new robot specifically developed for topiary trimming and evaluates its performance through a novel evaluation method. Experiments were carried out in a real garden letting the robot trim spherical-, cylindrical- and cuboid-shaped boxwood topiaries. The robot's performance was evaluated using a quantitative evaluation method, which made accurate 3D point clouds of the bush before and after trimming using photogrammetry. For each point in these point clouds, the Euclidean distance to the ground-truth shape was calculated and classified as correctly trimmed (CT) when the distance was within 2 cm of the ground-truth shape. Using this information the percentage of CT points before and after trimming were compared. Results show a reasonable robot accuracy when trimming spherical topiaries, reporting a 24 percentage point increase of CT points, going from 27% (before) to 51% (after) trimming of the bush surface. Cylinders and cuboids had a lower performance, which reported an increase of CT between −0.2 and 6 percentage point. The performance of the robot was also qualitatively assessed by human observers by scoring topiaries. The highest score of a single bush is a 3.1 out of 5. These results, combined with the quantitative evaluation show that the robot can trim autonomously, but it does not reach the required accuracy for practical application. Despite this, the evaluation method was able to reveal main bottlenecks of the robot in real-world experiments. Together with the robot description, this paper can be used as a guideline for the development and evaluation of gardening robots.

Simple or complex? Consumer response to display signs

Retail signage provides information from the marketer to facilitate product purchase. An increase in sign information creates greater sign complexity, which raises the question: for consumer product choices, what quantity of information is helpful versus overwhelming? We hypothesize that consumers would allocate more visual attention to complex signs and that sign complexity would be a predictor of likeliness to buy (LTB). Five experts rated 105 real garden center signs for complexity and five low, moderate, and highcomplexity signs were selected for the study. Signs were incorporated into Tobii X1 Light Eye Tracker software, where 85 non-student subjects rated sign attractiveness and LTB from a display containing that sign. Subjects allocated greater visual attention (higher fixation count and longer total fixation duration) to more complex signs, which were also rated as most attractive. Initial regression results showed sign attractiveness and fixation count were positive predictors of LTB, while complexity and total fixation duration were inversely related to LTB. Mediation analysis showed that fixation duration fully mediates fixation count impact on purchase intention. Results suggest that informationrich messaging in high complexity signs, while seen as attractive, may give consumers too much information and higher cognitive load, which makes decision-making more difficult.

The Construction of Empire-Garden in Sir Philip Sidney’s <i>New Arcadia</i>

The yearning to return to an idyllic ideal or a paradise of a long-lost past seems to be inherent in all men regardless of time and situation, and the poets have been the spokesmen for this dream. Garden poetry is variously reflected in the works of Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Ariosto, Tasso, Petrarch, Dante. The emblematic meaning of garden poetry during the European Renaissance and the prevalence of real garden at the time enormously inspires the imagination of the English poet to invent an ideal “England garden.” In addition, the progression of the spirit of nationalism that results from Reformation enables the court poet with political ideal ardently anticipates the coming of Elizabeth an empire garden. The Renaissance English poets metaphorically take a state or a “body politic” as a garden, which could be evidenced in the tradition of literature, politics, culture and religion at the time. Sir Philip Sidney, a courtier-poet-warrior of the sixteenth century England, zealously wrote his ideal of Elizabethan England into his pastoral romance, <i>New Arcadia</i>. This paper, while centering on the courtly culture, literary tradition and political ideal, attempts to present Sidney’s imagination of Elizabethan empire as a garden that is literally constructed in <i>New Arcadia</i> and hopefully reflects the humanistic ideal of the intellectuals of English Renaissance---the construction of a harmonious Elizabethan garden.

TB-Places: A Data Set for Visual Place Recognition in Garden Environments

Place recognition can be achieved by identifying whether a pair of images (a labeled reference image and a query image) depict the same place, regardless of appearance changes due to different viewpoints or lighting conditions. It is an important component of systems for camera localization and for loop closure detection and a widely studied problem for indoor or urban environments. Recently, the use of robots in agriculture and automatic gardening has created new challenges due to the highly repetitive appearance with prevalent green color and repetitive texture of garden-like scenes. The lack of available data recorded in gardens or plant fields makes difficult to improve localization algorithms for such environments. In this paper, we propose a new data set of garden images for testing algorithms for visual place recognition. It contains images with ground truth camera pose recorded in real gardens at different times, with varying light conditions. We also provide ground truth for all possible pairs of images, indicating whether they depict the same place or not. We also performed a thorough benchmark of several holistic (whole-image) descriptors, and provide the results on the proposed data set. We observed that existing descriptors have difficulties with scenes with repetitive textures and large changes of camera viewpoint.

Changes in visual interaction: Viewing a Japanese garden directly, through glass or as a projected image

This is a pilot study that examines how a person's gaze responds during the observation of a Japanese garden. Thirty-four participants were asked to viewed the same garden in three different ways: directly, through a pane of glass, or as a projected slide. We tracked their eye-movement during the first minutes of observation to observe different gaze strategies used in the different modalities of viewing. Our measurements show that when viewing the garden directly, participants focused on particular elements in their visual field. By contrast, when they viewed a slide they tended to scan the scene more and focus on all elements of the garden evenly. When viewing the real garden through a glass door, the responses were intermediate. Our results demonstrate that the visual evaluation of a space is different depending on the way in which the visual information is presented.

The Gardens of the British Working Class

The Gardens of the British Working Class

Characteristics of plant landscape of traditional academy gardens in Zhejiang.

Ancient Chinese academies tended to have garden environment. Plants were an indispensable element for academy to meet the demands of learning, residence, travel and other functions. Combining reviewing literature with investigation, this paper analyzed plant landscape of traditional academies in Zhejiang from natural landscape, artificial landscape and its culture, in order to restore the real garden environment of traditional academy. Characterized by the fun of nature, ingenuity of artificiality and elegance of culture, plant landscape of traditional academy in Zhejiang created the unique space and culture environment. The design idea of combining education with landscape also had great significance to the construction of modern campus. ［Ch, 3 fig. 1 tab. 26 ref.］

Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens By Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo University of California Press. 2014. 304 pp. $29.95 paperback

It is not surprising that so many cultures associate gardens with paradise. For a garden is a utopic space that exists first of all through our imagination. Alas, real gardens—our own, our neighbors’ down the street, or those in public spaces—have the disadvantage of requiring a great deal of time, energy, money, and just plain hard work. As anyone who has spent time planting, pruning, and weeding knows full well, gardening may be a labor of love, but it needs more. As Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo reminds us in her illuminating and provocative book on the gardenscapes of Southern California, the down-to-the earth, dirty hands, and backbreaking work of gardening falls disproportionately to the dispossessed, who labor long and hard not for love but for a living. In Southern California, these laborers are immigrants, middle-class Los Angelenos having deserted the care of their own lawns some decades ago. Early in the twentieth century, these immigrants were Japanese; today, they come from Mexico and Central and South America. Without them, the fervently desired earthly paradise would look more like a jungle. Hondagneu-Sotelo recovers the stories and the lives of these laborers. The landscapes represent much more than the bounty of nature come to fruition—these men, ultimately, who transform the arid into the lush landscapes that we associate with Southern California.

&lt;em&gt;Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England's Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870&lt;/em&gt;, by Judith W. Page and Elise L.Smith

Reviewed by: Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 by Judith W. Page, Elise L. Smith Mary Ellen Bellanca (bio) Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870, by Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith; pp. xvii + 314. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, £55.00, $93.00. This beautiful, extensively researched book confers order, clarity, and critical insight on the ubiquity of gardens in women’s lives and creative work from 1780 to 1870. In an apparently seamless collaboration—Judith W. Page is a scholar of English and gender studies, Elise L. Smith an art historian—the authors examine verbal and visual representations of the “domestic, or domesticated, landscape,” glossed as “nature that is near at hand, tended, cultured, and nurtured” (132). This designation, like “home landscape,” encompasses such activities as plant study, genre painting, and the writing of didactic children’s tales set in gardens, as well as gardening in the narrowest sense (1). The book explores many forms of representation and practice, parsing the “complex signification” of actual and metaphorical gardens and offering nuanced readings in a rich array of genres: fiction; journals; memoirs; book illustration; sketching; periodicals; and instructional guides on gardening, botany, and the visual arts (19). Seventy-two sumptuous illustrations complement the lucid and graceful writing. Page and Smith approach gardens as cultural texts, sites of horticultural and personal growth that express and instill behavioral expectations and social and moral codes. Focusing mainly on middle-class women, the authors calibrate the degrees to which home gardens underscored norms of domesticity, industry, modesty, and devotion to others. But they argue as well that the home landscape provided women and girls a locus of agency and self-cultivation, a “zone for experimentation” where domestic virtues and skills moved outward from the home’s interior into a liminal space, between the private and public realms, in which to experience knowledge-building, religious contemplation, creativity, and play (7). Nineteenth-century gardens, it seems, were [End Page 342] good to think with. In the absence of a real garden, advised the Child’s Companion in 1829, you can have “a garden of your mind,” as long as it is orderly and under control (qtd. in Page and Smith 24). Among Victorian works, the book examines the use of garden spaces in Margaret Oliphant’s Carlingford novels, in which the town’s genteel walled gardens and humbler plots open to the streets become markers of class, gender, and taste. Page and Smith situate Miss Marjoribanks (1866) within garden discourse that insists on neatness and trimness; the appearance and management (or neglect) of gardens signify the social positions of Lucilla Marjoribanks and the less privileged characters to whom she extends charity or contempt. We read that botanical artist Anna Maria Hussey negotiated tensions between her serious study of fungi and her upper-class female readers’ expectations of refinement, sentiment, and poetic language in her Illustrations of British Mycology (1847–55). Seeking to finesse competing demands, the authors contend, Hussey “domesticates science” by locating her readers “in the feminized realm of the home” (108), while for Hussey herself, “the home-bower becomes a place as much of intellectual curiosity as of repose” (109). Among the strengths of Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape is that its sheer variety of authors, artists, and works allows us to imagine non-canonical figures in dialogue with canonical ones, fiction with science, poetry with praxis. While impressive, the scope does not overwhelm, due to helpful chapter introductions, subheadings, and summaries. Coherence emerges through the unifying concern with gender and the trope of the home landscape as common ground for diverse achievements by creative women. The book traces brilliantly the “transitional motifs” of fences, gates, windows, arbors, and bowers, illuminating ways in which these border devices can suggest constraint and exploration, shelter and exclusion, the meanings of inside and outside (9). Incisively elucidated are cultural anxieties implied by garden writers’ debates on the function and value of feminine accomplishments, on incipient women’s professionalism in science and art, and on the fine line between “suitable exercise” and “unseemly romping” (39), not to mention...

Healing gardens: recommendations and criteria for design

The French Alzheimer plan anticipates new specialized structures for cognitive rehabilitation and psycho-behavioural therapy of Alzheimer's patients: the cognitive-behavioural units as follow-care units, the units of reinforced hospitalization inside the long term care units and the adapted activities units. this plan indicates the need to make healing gardens integral parts of these units. The benefits of green space in urban environments has been demonstrated with regards to physical, psychological and sociological effects and similarly studies in hospitals have revealed objective and measurable improvements of patients well being. Although green spaces and gardens are available in many French care units, they are rarely specifically adapted to the needs of Alzheimer's patients. For the garden "art, memory and life" a specific concept guided by a neuropsychological approach was developed, complemented by an artistic vision based on cultural invariants. It is already used in the frame of non-pharmacological therapies to improve symptoms such as deambulation, sleep disorders, apathy and aggressive behaviors. Based on the literature, and our experience and research, recommendations for the design of such gardens dedicated to Alzheimer's patients can be proposed. Beyond taking into account obvious aspects relating to security, allowing for free access, a careful design of walk-ways and a conscious choice of plants is needed. A systematic analysis of the existing green spaces or garden must be conducted in order to pinpoint the weakness of the space and identify the potential for developing it into a real healing garden. Evaluation of adapted questionnaires for users and professionals allow to establish a list of requirements combining both user requests and therapeutic needs as basis for the design of the garden as well as to evaluate during the course of the project, whether the needs of the various stakeholders have been met or if adjustments are necessary.

To push, pull or push–pull? A behavioural strategy for protecting small tomato plots from tephritid fruit flies

The protective effects of protein bait spays and oil emulsion sprays against fruit flies (Bactrocera tryoni (Froggatt)) were compared in an experiment with a simple split plot design using tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum L.) of two varieties. The sprays were then used in a second experimental design based on the ‘push–pull’ technique that would be relevant to home gardens and village horticulture. Each replicate of each treatment in each of two experiments was represented by a small group of fruiting tomato plants (that represented a small crop in a real garden to be protected by the technique). These were surrounded by other tomato plants (that were stripped of fruit) or by weeds (that represented other food plants or weeds in a real garden). Each category of plant was given either no treatment or imparted with a ‘push’ or a ‘pull’ stimulus with a bait spray or an oil spray to act on foraging fruit flies. A simultaneous comparison of all nine possible combinations of these treatments revealed that oil spray applied only to the central plants or to both the central and surrounding plants were two of the three most effective treatments for preventing fruit damage by fruit flies. Bait spray on its own was not always effective and, when paired with oil spray, was no more successful than no treatment paired with oil spray. Another experiment, restricted to combinations of oil spray and no spray, confirmed that plants were best protected by direct application of oil spray and that spraying surrounding plants as well was no better and that spraying surrounding plants alone was worse. These results were related to the small size of each ‘crop’ and known aspects of fruit fly behaviour.

Két atipikus Markó-festmény a kismartoni Esterházy-kastély parkjáról

The paper is connected to the Budapest exhibition in 2011 of Károly Markó (1793–1860), who was born in Hungary but earned a fame as a landscapist in Italy. In the exhibition catalogue Sabine Grabner wrote an article with the title Károly Markó's Viennese Connections, and published two, so-far unknown Markó paintings of 1831 from the central Bohemian country house of Červena Lhota: Landscape with figures in a boat and Landscape with figures strolling in the park. The present paper highlights the identification of the themes of the two paintings. Both were painted of the landscape garden of the Esterházy mansion in Kismarton/Eisenstadt, exactly its two most characteristic views: one shows the lateral view of the garden facade of the mansion and its surroundings, the other features the Leopoldine temple with the pond in front of it. The landscape garden and its edifices were commissioned by Prince Nicolaus Esterházy II (1765–1833), a fabulously rich Hungarian aristocrat and art collector from the Paris-based architect Charles Moreau who studied in Rome. The Leopoldine temple was modelled on the Sybilla temple in Tivoli (the marble statue of Esterházy's daughter Leopoldine was made by Canova for the temple). Contemporaries and posterity reckon with Markó as the painter of “ideal landscapes with Biblical or mythological figures” and later “Italian landscapes with peasants”. The two paintings of the Kismarton landscape garden are atypical because they present real garden segments, contemporary architecture and genre figures dressed in the fashionable garments of the painter's time. They are unparalleled in the whole Markó oeuvre. The paper compares the depicted garden sections and buildings with the venues today on the one hand, and with depictions approximately contemporaneous with Markó's works. The latter comparison provides ground to determine how much of the real sight is reflected in the pictures and how much is the pictorial trope drawn from a long-standing tradition by a painter of ideal landscapes. The paper also touches on the question of the client. It is found that the two pictures were not created for Prince Nicolaus Esterházy who had the mansion and the garden around it built in Eisenstadt, but for a Vienna banker, Markó's main sponsor baron Johann Jakob Geymüller (1760–1834) and his wife. It was from the Geymüller family's Bohemian country house at Kamenica nad Lipou/ Kamnitz that the two painting came to Červena Lhota, and they probably belonged to the multitude of Markó paintings the couple ordered directly from the painter. (In the Austrian mansion of the family at Hollenburg there were still 14 Markó paintings in the early 20th century.) This is also a good example of the shift of art patronage in the early 19th century from the old artistocracy to new art-supporting layers.

Lott's Bricks, The Arts and Crafts movement and Arnold Mitchell

Perhaps unexpectedly, architects are seldom talked about in terms of the building toys they once played with or what they constructed with them. Exceptions are Witold Rybczynski and Frank Lloyd Wright. The former describes John Ruskin mastering the laws of building for load-bearing towers and arches by the time he was seven or eight (around 1825) because of playing with wooden building blocks (introduced at the end of the 1700s). However, he also describes himself playing with Bayko. This was a Bakelite building set from the 1930s [1], probably modelled on Mobaco, a cardboard and wood Dutch construction toy [2]. Both of these toys are pre-dated by an 1887 English toy for house construction, the walls of which were made from wooden blocks threaded on to vertical wires. Rybczynski also describes watching his father and uncle build a real garden shed using concrete panels slipped between reinforcing bars, like the method used by the plastic toy but life-size.

Gardens of misery and perfection: introducing an annotated bibliography

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 2. My general contention that fictional gardens shadow our understanding of real gardens owes much to the inspiration of Gina Crandell, who explains how the developments of the visual arts changed forever the way we experience real landscapes in Nature Pictorialized: ‘The View’ in Landscape History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Crandell shows how culture influences our perceptions of landscape as much as the survival-driven determinants considered by such texts as Jay Appleton's Experience of Landscape, rev. ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996) or the functional considerations addressed by almost any office-generated project description. 3. (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 37. 4. Scott Elledge further explicates Milton's description of Paradise in the second Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 472. This edition includes Frank Kermode's essay, ‘Adam Unparadised’, which discusses Milton's sources for the Garden of Eden. Quotations are from Elledge's edition. 5. Ibid., p. 599. 6. The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), p. 41. Frye points out that: • Milton always externalizes evil and internalizes good (p. 109); • the Miltonian paradise is Arcadian and pastoral, not Utopian and historical, that is, not a social construct where man can live a better life (p. 114); and • the goal of mankind is the recovery of identity, ‘not the feeling that I am myself and not another, but the realization that there is only one man, one mind, and one world’ (p. 143). 7. (New York: Penguin, 1998), p. 12. 8. For the terrible consequences of this garden rendezvous, see Maud in Alfred Lord Tennyson, Selected Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 231ff. 9. See Hugh Haughton, introduction, Carroll, pp. lxxvi ff. 10. A Whistling Woman (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2002), pp. 139–140. 11. The Virgin in the Garden (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 128. 12. Still Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 9. 13. Babel Tower (New York: Random House, 1997), p. 522.

Growing Healthy Habits: Integrating Gardening and Nutrition Education Into the Elementary Classroom

Virtual garden learning will prepare children for real garden production and garden sales. Evaluation: Evaluation will be conducted by administering preand posttest surveys with youths engaged in the virtual world. Conclusions and Implications: Children, through their passion for technology and use of social media, feel connected with peers. They have an awareness of the issues and should be empowered to be part of a healthier solution. Children will be given the opportunity to virtually grow healthy food and experience healthy outcomes and encouraged to transfer their knowledge to the real world. This project was funded in part by USDA SNAP-Ed funding.

Requirements Elicitation with and for Older Adults

The study investigated the strengths and weaknesses of existing user-centered design (UCD) methods for eliciting requirements from older adults. A case study in which older people are involved in designing, developing, and evaluating a virtual-garden prototype. Users could potentially employ this device (which has an interface that resembles a real garden) as an empathic information appliance that would provide weather forecasts and help control smart devices and assistive technologies. Creativity-oriented techniques are suggested to designers, developers, and engineers when creating products so that older people are included in the market consideration.

The facts of evolution: fighting the Endarkenment

The facts of evolution: fighting the Endarkenment

The Trials of Art: Testing Temperance in the Bower of Bliss and Diana’s Grove at Nonsuch

This essay reconstructs the experience of visiting Diana’s Grove at Lord Lumley’s Nonsuch, a celebrated sixteenth-century pleasure garden, to show how the period’s real gardens prepared readers to engage the didactic architecture of Spenser’s Bower of Bliss. By establishing the parallel structural schemes of Bower and Grove, it demonstrates that Spenser’s garden setting would have impelled contemporary readers to measure their own reactions to the Bower’s moral tests against Guyon’s. The paper traces the shifting triangulation of reader, knight, and garden to reveal Guyon as a flawed exemplum, an inadequate model of the right relation of virtuous man to sensuous art.