Plant Talk

Picasso Exhibit at SAM is a Visual Feast - Gardeners Must Go For the Sheer Thrill of Color, if Nothing Else....

I was lucky enough to have lunch with  British author Anna Pavord ("The Tulip") when she visited Seattle last spring. Over soup at Swanson's Nursery she deplored how much time gardeners waste on Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. etc. "Gardeners are getting ingrown!" she declared. Her prescription is to read, tour cities, get out and go to galleries and art museums, for we develop our eye, discrimination, and color sense not just from gardens, but from the greater world around us. Such experiences enrich our lives and thus our gardens.

We have a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime (unless you plan to go to the Musée National Picasso in Paris once it's reopened) chance to see a mind-bending, sensory overload of Picasso's work at the Seattle Art Museum through January 17. I've been twice and hope to go again; an artist friend of mine has already been to the exhibit five times. Whether you're a Picasso admirer or not, you can't help but feel you're in the presence of such exuberance, genius and originality...

The explosion of color, the bits and pieces of fractured compositions, the landscapes and views looking in and out of windows - all speak especially to those of us who ponder such things in our gardens. I was surprised how much nature is in these paintings...for every painting I had to look away from in disgust or even anger (his attitude toward women can be hard to take) many others I studied in awe and amazement. It's surprisingly easy to get tickets...just order online, print them out, and show up at the appointed time....you'll never see your garden, and perhaps the world, in quite the same way again after this mind-boggling tour through Picasso's world...

Art In The Garden - Readers Respond, and We Have a Contest Winner!

Thanks for all the fabulous responses about your favorite garden art - from rustic benches to trees crafted of rusty rebar, "Plant Talk" readers have an expanded concept of what art can mean in the garden....and you're such good writers! Here's an especially lovely excerpt from Chris:

  "St. Francis... is standing on my beautiful...also old, rock wall...partially hidden among the salal and rhodys that surround him....he is covered with a beautiful patina of tiny lichens and moss. When it snows he gets the most lovely white hat!".

So it was again hard to pick a winner...but since I believe that the best art is personal and heart-driven, Maria Carlos is the winner....an autographed copy of "Artists In Their Gardens" is in the mail...Here's Maria's comment in full:

"My favorite garden art brings love into the garden, honoring cherished people and memories. It's hard to choose just one piece. Today, December 12, in honor of her feast day, I'll tell you about the colorful tile of La Virgen de Guadalupe placed on a yellow-painted wooden Mexican folk-art chair, and planted among maroon daylilies and Cotinus 'Grace'. It honors my Chicano father, and my heart fills when I see this in the garden."

Congratulations, Maria....stay tuned for our last December contest; to be announced Monday, Dec. 20th..

Seeing is Forgetting....

I always think that art, architecture and interior design books and magazines can teach us more about gardening than most things written with gardeners in mind.

 One of my great frustrations when I worked at the University of Washington was the many experts who knew so much about plants, yet so little. They studied plants; they rarely smelled, felt, appreciated or nurtured them. This whole idea of the experiential versus the theoretical/conceptual is at the heart of a fabulous book I'm reading called "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin." (by Lawrence Weschler, University of California Press, 2008).  Isn't that title in itself a masterful rebuke of taxonomy?

The book is worth reading just for the chapter ("When Fountainheads Collide") on how Irwin won the commission for the garden at the Getty, and how he pulled it off. Most of all I love how he defines modernism as not being any particular style, but rather a way of engaging the world.....

Here's one of my favorite photos of the controversial garden Irwin designed for the Getty Museum; the story of how he went about it (beginning with cutting up plant books and rearranging the photos into collages) is fascinating....