Art and Gardens

Art and Gardens and Us

What do Art and Gardens Have in Common?

Both art and gardens are wonderful to look at and spend time with. Both require some dedicated time to create and appreciate. Both produce results showing the influence of their particular artist or gardener. Both burst full with new creations that sometimes surprise even their originators. And both also have fallow times, times for replenishing their sources and seeds.

Summer Flowers, painting by Janet Strayer

What Art and Gardens Say About Us

Art and gardens have a lot to say about us, that is, human beings. Neither art nor gardens are natural in the sense of springing directly from nature. Wildflowers and plants are nature's domain, providing wild and wonderful forms of beauty. There are no weeds in nature's blooming fields. Yet , from earliest times, we seem to have needed to insert our visions and intentions when creating both art and gardens.

Why? In order, I think, to establish, sustain and connect our personal vision, and perhaps some sense of control, amidst the vast chaotic forces around us. To affirm our willingness to tame, be part of and care for our bit of nature. To participate in nurturance and growth. To enjoy the visual and sensory pleasures of an enclosed, safe, and beautiful outdoor haven we have created.

We have little or no control over natural circumstances and little personal impact on world disasters caused by our species. But in art, as in gardening, we take some control in the form of our intention to make something out of the materials we've got. We create something for its expressive and communicative value, for the sustenance or meaning it provides Both art and gardens may also accomplish something more: a sharpened vision and interest in the world we have or want to have. They may reach towards something both vitally mundane and transcendent . Art and gardens signal us to look out there and into and beyond ourselves as people on the earth.

Garden as Symbol, Story, and Gift

I've come to value my flower garden over the years. Growing up in apartments , gardening was something others did. I lived vertically in towers, even working in the ivory tower of my choice. Settling into a rural community as a mature adult was a revelation to me in many ways. I started my very first garden right in the newly plowed earth. It was hard work. Not a pot-garden or a terraced one, but a come-as-you-can from the ground one! This garden became my personal symbol of how things change and grow, not always for the better, but making the best of it anyway.

My garden started as a fantasy. WIth no gardening experience and only potted jade plants surviving in my city apartment, it was a bold move for me. Yet once we came to live on Saturna Island, I knew I had to plant a garden. First, a fence had to be built because the plentiful deer eat almost everything. Daffodils are exempt, and you can see many planted in the garden path leading down from house to fenced garden. I painted the garden shed (to the side) with a fantasy theme befitting my garden-to-be. With the help of my mate, we pounded narrow brick paths into the ground -- inspired by Oz's yellow brick road but leaving the bricks unpainted.

In the sections surrounding these paths, I started planting a riot of assorted flowers. I knew nothing about horticulture and thought only of colours I wanted. Rosebushes were to be the queens of my enchanted domain, so I planted these first at corners of my intersecting little red brick road. I favoured perennials, knowing so little about plant maintenance and not wanting to fuss too much. I couldn't tell whether growing green sprouts were weeds or flowers, so just let them all grow: a mix of of the wild and the cultured. I never aimed to be a fastidious warden of my garden and continue to be a casual, sometimes wayward, gardener. My philosophy was: I plant, you grow (or not) and I'll do what I can.

The results were incredible! Look at the video! I was amazed every time the seeds I'd planted became flowers! A new experience for me, and one that continues to delight. I've planted so many different seeds, not knowing which flowers would emerge. I'm sure many seeds didn't make it. The process was magical: that things actually grew and flowered into amazingly colourful, aromatic delights. Perhaps you can imagine how proud and grateful this made me, to know that these city-raised hands could have a part in creating this little bit of paradise.

Over the years, my garden has continued to surprise and delight me. It's a joy to walk by this time of year, seeing new growth daily, to sit in, watch the bees (too few) and amazing hummingbirds who will hover beside the spray of the watering hose. I feel lucky.

Creative Link between Art and Gardening

My garden was planned and planted with no gardening experience and only my artistic vision to guide it: an off-center focal area, contrasts of colour and texture filling the quadrants, and accents in some of the border areas That's like thinking about a possible painting. This garden has become one of the most magical and enjoyable things I've helped to create. Nature plays the larger role in its creation. Wildflowers enter where I haven't planted them and things bloom that I'm not sure I planted intentionally. My garden doesn't fit into the "house-and-garden" perfection category. Created with regard to my own vision, attitudes, and some hope, it's a treat for me and others who get to see it.

About the same time the garden was planted, we built my art studio up a small hill from our house. That's either coincidence or synchronicity. I'd had more experience as a painter than as a gardener, but my painting took off with that studio.

I've rarely painted flowers because I have my gardening for that. But, curiously, the less able I am to work in my garden (spinal issues), the more floral shapes have cropped up in my paintings. The links between creating art and gardening seem powerful to me. I often approach my art process the same way as my gardening: plant the seeds, see what comes, go on from there. And, just as with my garden, I am a prolifically eclectic painter.

Is Nature On My Side? Remaining an Amateur

Creating art differs from gardening, despite their creative links. The earth knows what it will produce from the plants and seeds in it. The canvas doesn't. So, the artist's intention and skill matter more. I'm far more demanding as an artist than as a gardener. Is that positive or negative?

Painting outdoors on Saturna Island (Janet Strayer)

Perhaps there's some value in always remaining an amateur (doing it for love). You do things because you love doing and learning, not because it's your profession with its own demands. Amateurs literally do things because the process gives them some joy. You may put all you can into the process but have fewer expectations or demands regarding the outcome. Perhaps because you know so little of what to expect as an amateur, you remain open. You risk trying new things to see what will happen.

Forever Young, painting by Janet Strayer

The links between art and gardening are powerful reminders and clues for the creative process. For my perspective, gardening helps remind me how generative just being inside the creative process can be: just doing the work, preparing the ground, planting seeds, seeing what works and what doesn't, weeding as needed (discerning weeds from potential flowers). 

You come to appreciate just being able to make art (or be in the garden). As with gardening in nature, I like to create art that doesn't aim to copy reality but to re-envision or imagine it. For me, they both require the skills and insights you have to exert some control over directions and decisions, but also the grace to relinquish control in favour of attention and adaptations to the changes occurring during the evolving process . Knowing when and how to apply both aspects is the art in it all ! And that seems a rather BIG life lesson too.

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