Tapping into the creative side of gardening

I've been thinking about this topic for a while:  this post a couple of years ago reflected on some of my thoughts then.

I totally rediscovered my creative side through gardening and thinking about designing with plants, in general.

Writing about my nature and gardening observations has been a wonderful creative outlet, I've realized, too, for the past seven years.  And through many posts. Teaching classes about gardening, too, has focused my attention back to creativity as well.

What do YOU really want in your garden?  It's all individual.  We all have different tastes, color preferences, plant memories, etc.

An artist friend of mine said "creativity" was a word that would scare folks away from a workshop or class;  she was right.

I've not managed to have a workshop or class make (around gardening and creativity) until this fall, now with the "Tapping into the Creative Side of Gardening" title).

It's puzzling to me, as so many gardeners are truly creative, but perhaps don't recognize it as such?

Artists who are also gardeners frequently create extraordinarily unusual gardens.  I was reviewing images this afternoon from some that I've seen (on Garden Bloggers Flings) -- amazing gardens!

Here are some images from Kayla Meadow's garden in the East Bay (Berkeley), CA, from 2012, visited during the SF Fling.

tiles, lilies etc.

a colorful combination

out a side door

a wonderful tiled area

my clogs matched the tiles

inside her house

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Taking my own advice (re gardening)

I've found doing landscape consultations both fun and rewarding (interesting, too).

What I love to do is help encourage people to consider all of their "needs" in their landscape (they're all SO different), but most importantly, I find, is to encourage them to focus on what kind of gardening they enjoy and what kind of garden welcomes them home.

We don't want to come home to containers or perennials that need watering ASAP, that's for sure, or have the same niggling weedy mess in the corner to look at, or the outdated pot collection.  Decluttering and editing in the garden is a process that rewards dividends.

So, in our Piedmont garden (1.5 acres) converted from lawn to natural landscape, it's now careened into something that I feel is totally overgrown after 20 years, but beautiful still.

I've realized that absent my gardening companion (while writing two books) over the last decade, I simply haven't thought about dealing with all of the shrubs!  Some of them have gotten really big. So, what do I do now?  Especially after a summer away, with another garden to tend, and just another academic year here.

Well, I follow my own advice. 

I don't think about what it "used" to look like, and envision cleaned up spaces.

view from my study

I work through the garden in phases, from the areas near the many large shrubs (which are perfectly attractive, to be sure), tidy up the borders, the main vegetable garden area (aargh), and do the equivalent of bush-hogging the front meadow.

Hmrhph.  I'll take a photo of the "meadow" and post it -- it's common milkweed and river oats now.  Yikes.

I clean up all of the weedy bits, celebrate the nice stuff, and enjoy the views from my study, porch, and front windows.

the front meadow (looking like a meadow)

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Creativity and gardening

Gardening is a creative activity, in my experience.

I've loved putting plants together in containers in agreeable ways, mixing up vegetables and herbs in attractive combinations, and helping my gardening companion recreate natural plant combinations while restoring landscapes, etc.

Finalizing a weekend program (on Gardening and Creativity) for the John C. Campbell Folk School (for next April, 2014) had me thinking again about the gifts of gardening.

I'd mused on this subject last December as I was thinking about doing programs (and re-reading Fran Sorin's lovely book, Digging Deep: Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening.)

And my thinking about this was reinforced earlier this week at the Davidson Horticultural Symposium, where Noel Kingsbury talked about a German garden designer whose muse was music and gardens, and Julie Moir Messervy recounted (at the end of a presentation about contemplative gardening) the experience of designing the Toronto Music Garden. 

I found a visit to the Toronto Music Garden amazing -- it was totally inspirational for me (in the context of visiting a garden with a meaningful experience) to listen to the audio tour through the garden in mid-summer some years ago).

Do you hear music in gardens? 

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Gardening and creativity

I've been re-reading a lovely book that I've had for awhile -- Fran Sorin's Digging Deep: Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening.  She's a tremendously wise gardener, and her book, published in 2004, has obvious 'legs' as it's still in print.

I'm planning on leading a workshop this spring where we'll explore some of the  exercises she describes in her book. And, I'm proposing another workshop and a talk based on this approach in the future, as well.

I think we're missing the creativity in gardening in our popular horticultural press in this country (probably in NA as a whole).  We're all about landscaping language (and tasks), even in fairly sophisticated pieces about gardening in our various magazines, websites, etc.

I've greatly enjoyed Gardens Illustrated (published through the BBC in the UK) for its plant and design-based approach -- they seem to be more about celebrating the creativity of the garden designer and the gardener, instead of thinking about gardens as the equivalent of a room that gets "decorated" every so often, so the articles seem like they have a fresh approach.

Plants grow and change, so are a challenging artistic medium, but they provide an exceptional creative palette, too, for expressing and creating a surrounding space (a garden, if you will) that suits YOU, not anyone else.

Piet and Anja Oudolf's garden, late September 2012

That's what I'm thinking about when I'm considering why I garden and for what purpose, and how I encourage folks in my classes, too, for that matter.

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