Arboretum art - Andy Goldsworthy

Last weekend we headed back to that old favourite haunt, the Harcourt Arboretum, to see how it looks now autumn is beginning to encroach. We found some wonderful fungi:

 

And beautiful colours in the leaves:

These were exactly what I was looking for, since I'd persuaded my children that they'd really love to collect a whole heap of beautifully coloured autumn leaves and help to make an Andy Goldsworthy style work of art.

They happily embraced the idea of collecting things, but were apparently not listening to the more precise elements of the brief, so we ended up with a less uniform collection of leaves than I had envisaged. That’ll teach me to be a perfectionist and then ask children to help me! We headed for the rather fabulous new barn and began to sort out our motley array of leaves, to see what we could make of it.

I had visions of beautiful concentric rings of perfectly uniform leaves, but actually I think the more varied texture provided by the different shapes and sizes is rather appealing. And I like to think that the individually placed leaves radiating out make it much more dramatic than the original central circle would have been on its own. (Though I must credit my husband with that idea, since by then I was being grumpy because our children had bounced off together to dig up stones in a rather fine patch of mud they'd found, and were no longer interested in my grand artistic creation...)

There's more about the barn here and here if you’re interested (scroll down to the bottom for the bit about building the barn) - it really is a beautiful structure. 

And the rest of the Arboretum is in pretty fine form too. This is the Lime walk - still looking fabulously green:

Do you have any good recommendations for outdoor art with children? Or for holding their attention to the end? (Maybe waiting till they're older will work on this one!)