The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin

"The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin" is a blog and environment created by the artist and academic Paul Harris, who describes it as "a xeriscape in the California Heights neighborhood of Long Beach, California, where many residents have taken advantage of a city program that subsidizes the conversion of grass lawns into drought-tolerant landscapes. The garden was conceived in 2009 when Pierre Jardin coined the neologism ‘petriverse’ to denote both a world composed of rocks and words composed of rocks. The site has become known for two distinctive features: it presents constantly changing, eye-catching displays of locally collected stones, and amuses viewers with pithy petricthemed text-messages formed with pebbles. When he started a Petriverse blog, Pierre Jardin christened it with the figuratively and literally fitting tagline “a rock garden where nothing is written in stone.”

A stone-cold delight. Pictured above: rock guy Roger Callois pondering stone.