Summer Dragon

Today I went with my friend Sonya to the Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh. It's part of my alma mater NC State University's campus. We discovered this dragon marvel which was commissioned to honor the new Asian Garden Walk that has finally opened up just adjacent to it. Leroy (the dragon) is made almost entirely out of bamboo. He was constructed by Prof. Will Hooker's small-scale landscape design class students. The class chose an idea submitted by Justin Durango (one of their fellow classmates): a Chinese dragon flowing in and out of the ground, with a 9-foot-tall head, three body loops, and an 8-foot-long tail with a rotating double spiral ending. The class harvested over 100 bamboo culms from a bamboo grove in Durham (my hometown) - which is about 20 miles away from Raleigh. Leroy took 15 days to build and install, with the class and 26 other volunteers putting in close to 1,200 hours of labor to complete the task.