Students from professor Will Hooker’s landscape design class installed more than 400 pieces of bamboo and more than 100 gazing balls in the pond behind the N.C. Museum of Art.

The piece, Hooker said, is intended to call attention to a Monet exhibit coming to the museum in mid-October.

“[The museum] asked me to do something that would echo in effect…Monet’s work,” Hooker said.

The title of the pond piece is “Reflections from the Ru.” The Ru, Hooker said, is a tributary of the Seine River that feeds Monet’s pond.

The gazing balls, hand-blown glass balls that come in many colors, were meant to call to mind the colors Monet employed in his water lily paintings, he added. The balls used were four, 10 and 12 inches in diameter and ranged from red to purple.

Andrew Baucom, a senior in landscape design, said he preferred the hands-on project to learning in a classroom.

“It’s kind of exciting and it’s very different than anything we’ve ever done,” he said. “It’s really neat to be able to come out into the field and work on a project instead of sitting in a classroom.”

The group encountered problems with the 12-inch glass balls breaking, either in transport or in the pond. Out of the 150 balls ordered, 44 balls broke at roughly $10 a piece, Hooker said.

“I’m somewhat disappointed,” he said. “I don’t know how many hundreds of dollars we left at the bottom of that pond.”

While Hooker was disappointed with the durability of the balls, he said he was not disappointed with the outcome of the piece.

“It’s the exact perfect form of nature. It’s so incredibly fragile … it’s the strongest and the weakest,” he said. “It’s a wonderful way of looking at life.”

Students who participated in the creation of the piece agreed that it was an interesting experience.

“It was nice to watch it all come together,” Paul Hesselblad, a senior in landscape design, said. “I actually think it looks great right now. It does a good job of tying in with the exhibit.”

Borden Edgerton, a junior in horticulture landscape, said the piece adds a lot to the pond.

“I like the vertical aspect,” he said of the bamboo. “It adds to the sense of surrounding. It’s not so bare and empty and it draws your eye down to the pond.”

The Monet exhibit is scheduled to open on Oct. 15.