The Big Brussels Sprout

The Yarra Valley is good sprout country. Brussels sprouts need a long cool growing season and improve markedly after frost, which the valley delivers, and the crop has been grown commercially around Coldstream and Silvan for generations.

A sprout is a genuinely unusual thing to build large. It has almost no distinguishing features – a tight green sphere of overlapping leaves – and at scale it risks reading as a cabbage, a lettuce or an unspecified green lump. Getting it to be recognisably a sprout is harder than a carrot or a banana.

It also has an image problem the sculpture cannot avoid. The Brussels sprout is the most reliably disliked vegetable in the English-speaking world, and a farm that specialises in them putting up a giant one is either defiance or good humour, and probably both.

This is the second giant sprout in the catalogue. The other is Sir Lancelot at Ohakune's Carrotland in New Zealand, given a knighthood and a personality – which is the more affectionate treatment of the two.

The record notes honestly that the exact sculpture pin and visitor access arrangement have not been independently mapped, so this is a working farm rather than a confirmed visitor stop.

Not documented anywhere: its scale.