Art in The Garden

When art is incorporated into the landscape, there is nothing ordinary about it.  When a landscape is transformed by art rich with ideas and feeling liberated, it creates a ‘daring’ in all of us.  When a landscape is transformed with art, it is a simpler scene, made up not so much of plants but of shapes (upright, rounded fan), colors that harmonize or contrast with one another (sliver leaf with vivid red), and textures composed by the scale and arrangement of the leaves.  Art within your landscape may come in the form of a trellis or arbor, a meandering decomposed granite walkway contrasting amongst the monochromatic colors of green that surround it.  Vertical and rigid allium bulbs, in all their purple majesty against a backdrop of arched trellises covered in Three-Leaf Akebia (Akebia trifoliate) vine.  The nature of art is to delight and to instruct, and there is no better way than to create delight within your garden with the combination of art and vegetation.

Melding indoor and outdoor space should flow seamlessly together, through glass windows or doors, your gardens should be designed to bring fragrance, flower and foliage into one.  Indoor repose is extended into your garden with cushioned benches and chairs, fitting snugly beneath the overhangs or tucked into a vine covered pergola.  Creating movement and momentum is important, in art and in your garden for you do not want your garden to appear static.  This can be accomplished in many ways, from creating transitional color and texture as plants change from season to season and also by the

infusion of art, in this case a steel trellis with wide swoops, its spirals and tendril directing the eye to the brightly blooming climbing red rose.  People also add movement and momentum in your garden, by simply installing a meandering pathway, humans become the 3-D object and for those that like to keep it simple with clean lines, you could also chooses plants with bold and striking shapes to be the form in the garden, such as planting Roundleaf Alumroot (Heuchera cylindrical), or False Spiraea (Sorbaria sorbifolia) amongst a backdrop of pruned Boxwood (Buxus michrophylla).  Having art as the form in the garden, more than a color or texture for example, can be achieved by keeping your plantings simple, and maintaining your pruning for architectural lines.  You can create form with vertical pieces, such as large cylinder shaped vessels, in which you may not decide to plant anything at all.  In this case, color, texture and flower, the normal language of the garden, are heard as barely a whisper.