A thousand paintings in my garden

As on many other Sundays, I started the morning googling new-to-me artists and artworks, and found quite a trove of them. Looking at the great variety of locations and subjects made me feel that all the work my garden requires is like a great anchor around my neck, keeping me here working on it when I could otherwise be out doing plein air paintings and exploring beautiful places. Then as I was opening my back bedroom window, I looked down across my blooming red daylilies and geums to the billowing zebra grass just starting to show its warm-weather stripes, past the blue mopheads of the Nikko Blue hydrangea, to the soft cloudy light reflecting off the metal barn roof. I brought out my camera to take a photo, and ended up taking a dozen as image after image clicked in my mind as being so very paintable.

Daylily Apple Tart

I took back the words of my lament and ate them as quickly as possible, and laid my misplaced remorse at the feet of Mother Nature, as I resolved to honor these works of life in more, and hopefully better, paintings.

Jackmanii clematis in Big Apple Kousa dogwood

The now voluminous Nikko Blue

Mixed perennials with my new armillary

Satomi Kousa dogwood, the second tree I planted here

Daylily Chicago Ruby

Looking up through the Satomi

The Fairies' table

Workshop with a Master

I was lucky enough to get to attend a workshop this morning with Patrick Gracewood, a noted sculptor, dancer, gardener, and teacher in Portland. The workshop was on how to site sculpture in a garden, both to show off the sculpture most effectively, and to enhance the garden, particularly by solving problems.

Sculpture arrangement at Gracewood Studio

This arrangement is the first sculpture you see as you enter his garden at the end of a long walkway. It demonstrates how to use sculpture to lead your eyes through a garden, to make you look and move in one direction, or from one place to the next. It also shows how you can combine permanent (as in, heavy and hard to move) sculptures and supports with temporary elements such as this beautiful braided wreath and fresh alstroemeria flower stems.

One of the other demonstrations was how to use a screen to make a feature stand out from the background and focus attention on it. The feature could be anything that has meaning for you—in this case, a beautiful bonsai.

Bonsai Acer circinatum

This large Miscanthus grass makes a great textured background for a special display, but sadly, this bonsai dwarf vine maple doesn't work with it because the texture and level of detail are so similar.

Patrick (right) and friend Tait with teak screen 

However, this oriental-style screen which Patrick made out of scrapped pieces of teak that were to be thrown away both frames the feature and makes a beautiful background for it, with the added benefit of the shadow play of the little tree on the wood.

You can see more about Patrick at www.GracewoodStudio.com, and if you ever have a chance to visit and see his incredible sculptures up close, I humbly suggest that you drop what you're doing and GO. His presentation was unusually interesting and gave me a lot to think about in my own garden. He talked about using sculptures in layouts specifically to make you sit down in your garden and just be in it.

One of the principles he mentioned was the concept of sacred time, or kairos (greek), as opposed to chronos, measured (chronological) time. A garden isn't just decorative, it's profoundly functional in that it can pull you out of the hurry and bustle of your "real" life and make you slow down to the speed of nature, which is much, much slower—like the speed of deep, relaxed breathing.