Garden Foot Creature – Go all out for an experience of a lifetime. Join us during the regular season as we focus on Maine’s forests, from their history to their sustainability. The magical, mystical and massive wooden troll sculpture of the Danish artist Thomas Dambo will support our efforts. Our trolls will help you discover new ways to get lost and find yourself in our forest.
These gigantic trolls hide in our native natural forests, waiting to be discovered. They are friendly, but their information is something you have to discover on your own. Find our trolls and discover the teachings they taught, then put all the clues together and learn the secrets of the Seed Keepers. This is your chance to disconnect from the world, only to reconnect with the Earth.
Garden Foot Creature
Planning to visit Seed Keeper this season? Prepare for your visit by checking out our Trolls FAQ and visit information.
Hunting A Creature That Hunts Me
Forests keep us alive, and by remembering to save the seeds and plant more trees, we can help keep them alive too.
When we rethink the way we produce and consume, we are doing more than just eliminating waste — we are also eliminating the idea of waste.
When we understand the natural environment in our communities, we become better stewards of the environment. When you find things you like out there, share them and help others expand their curiosity.
Thomas Dambo is considered a leading recycled material artist in the world, best known for his troll sculptures. Dambo’s creations are stunning, each sculpture invites the explorer to delve deeper into our woods while telling a story of conservation.
Design Toscano Extended Grace Angel Garden Statue, 24 Inch, Polyresin, Antique Stone
According to Per Dambo, “the project becomes an open fuse for wonder,” inspiring people to see the natural world through a whimsical and different lens. Because Dambo’s work uses recycled materials, it reinforces the value of using what we have to create something new, while bringing people of different skill sets and backgrounds together in our community.
Thomas Dambo was born in Odense, Denmark, lives and works in Copenhagen. Dambo has been building and creating with wood since the age of five and has become one of the fastest growing figures on the Scandinavian art scene. As a child, he would scour the neighbors for scrap wood to use in his projects, then haul it home on his bicycle. A childhood love of “treasure hunting” certainly foreshadows his current global troll hunt.
As a self-proclaimed ‘recycling art activist’, his trolls rank among Denmark’s most important attractions and spread around the world, telling a story not only of sustainability but of global connection. Dambo is creating a global village, one troll at a time.
He believes that beauty can be found everywhere – especially in the unexplored areas of our yards – his trolls are always hidden, but diligent explorers (with correct answers to given riddles) will soon find them “hidden” In full view.
Why Do We Cling To Art In Apocalyptic Times?
Dambo started the effort in 2014 and since then has created dozens of trolls that now live in parks, green spaces and forests around the world. CMBG trolls will join a community that spans the entire world, from Florida to Chicago, from Korea to China, from Denmark to Puerto Rico to Belgium. Explore the stories of his world at www.trollmap.com.
Each of our trolls represents a part of the tree and tells a story about why each part of the tree is important to the forest as a whole. Meet the Seed Guardians and learn more about each troll.
The giant trolls guard their ten secret seeds, which are vital to preserving the biodiversity of the forest for future generations. But trolls are not just guardians; they are also teachers. Forests are made up of interdependent and interconnected individuals. This diversity of species is beneficial not only for the trees, but for all the birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, fungi and amphibians that eat and shelter the trees. The more species there are, the more isolated they are from challenges such as a warming climate and diseased forests.
We lost two trees in the Maine forests — the American chestnut and the American elm. Both trees were once an important part of everyday life, planted in farms and homes for their beauty. Standing more than 100 feet tall, the American chestnut tree, known as the “eastern redwood,” made up a quarter of all the trees in the eastern forests before the chestnut blight fungus they decimated their numbers. When Dutch elm disease spread across the country, the elm-dotted forest town was forever changed. When we lose our trees, we lose our stories and our connection to the landscape. Unfortunately, we can’t always keep up with these threats—and now many more trees, like our hemlock and ash trees, are at risk. What will our Maine forests look like in the future? Fortunately, our actions today can determine that.
House On The Rock
With their longevity and long-term perspective, these trolls have seen the consequences of such threats. They can help, but they cannot do the work alone. They need the help of “little people” all over the world. Can you help me? Read and learn more about the biodiversity trolls are trying to protect in our blog post below.
With the help of our giant trolls, we can discover the importance of biodiversity for forest health and learn how to better manage this vital ecosystem. But what exactly is biodiversity, and why is it important?
People often criticize the black cherry that looks uninvited in their landscapes. But let’s make a case for preservation and even welcome these native trees.
Can humans have a lasting positive impact on the environment? A new study led by Chelsey Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University offers hope that perhaps human land use can have lasting positive effects after all.
My Garden Of A Thousand Bees
Seed Keepers is made possible through the generous support of L.L.Bean, the Davis Family Foundation, the Jane’s Trust, and an anonymous donor.
We continue to seek support for this remarkable exhibition. If you are interested in becoming a Guardians of the Seeds supporter, please contact Jen McKane.
The mission of the Maine Coastal Botanical Gardens is to inspire meaningful connections between people, plants and nature through gardening, education and research. This scary-looking scaly-footed snail has evolved a sulfur-removing armor. They only live in three small places. Photo: Dr. Chong Chen/IUCN
The first in The Guardian’s new series on extraordinary new species discovered in the ocean introduces the strange shell-footed snail, or sea pangolin – a creature with exceptional skills.
Bigfoot In The Redwoods
A golden snail with iron scales covering its legs looks like something out of science fiction. But in some remote parts of the Indian Ocean, these snails are very real.
“It looked like an armored knight crawling on the bottom of the deep ocean,” says Julia Sigwart, a biologist at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt, one of the only people to have seen a live shell-footed snail (
The habitat of the snail is extreme. They live miles below the surface of the ocean on scorching hydrothermal vents that are bathed in toxic chemicals at temperatures above 300 degrees Celsius (572 degrees Fahrenheit).
The ocean is one of the last truly wild spaces on earth. It is full of fascinating species that sometimes seem bordering on the ridiculous, from fish that look up through transparent heads to golden snails covered in iron armor. We know more about deep space than we do about the deep ocean, and science is just beginning to scratch the surface of the rich and diverse life that lives there.
Alpine Corporation Outdoor Angel Statue, 31 Inches
As mining companies push to industrialize the seabed and global leaders continue to debate how to protect the high seas, a new Guardian seascape series takes a look at some of the strange, wonderful, majestic, ridiculous, tough creatures and exciting that they came recently. What they reveal How much remains to be learned about the planet’s little-known environments—and how much needs to be protected.
The snail’s entire body and lifestyle revolves around bacteria that grow inside a special pouch in their throat that converts the chemicals expelled from the vent into energy that provides food for the entire snail.
To keep their microbes well fed, the Lepidopod snails have evolved giant gills to suck oxygen and chemicals from sea water, then transport them through their blood and a giant heart. A human heart in equivalent proportions would be the size of our head.
In 2019, scientists discovered that the scales on the legs of snails are designed not to ward off predatory attacks, but to ward off poisonous threats from within. The bacteria that hide in the throat of the snail release sulfur as a waste product, which is fatal to the snail (it is a common active ingredient in tablets that kill snails and slugs).
Gray Fairy Garden Sculpture
The inner structure of their scales act as tiny exhaust pipes, sucking dangerous sulfur from the snail’s soft tissues and depositing it on the outside as a harmless iron-based compound.
Although they have evolved a number of strange adaptations to survive through vents, the shell-footed snails do not expect humans to show interest in their habitat. The three sites where they live – covering an area of just under 0.025 square kilometers (0.01 square miles), which together fit into St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City – are potential targets for deep-sea drilling.
The scaly-footed snail known as the sea pangolin was added to it