Each Little World

Flowers at the CBG Fair

Though the Chicago Botanic Garden calls its annual event an "Antiques and GARDEN Fair" there were not as many items which could actually find a home outside in the garden as I would have liked. On the other hand, there were some wonderful indoor flower and garden displays that we greatly enjoyed. The theme of the show was “Color in the Garden: An Artist’s View.” 

As you can see from the picture below almost all the vendors also had some kind of flowers or plants included in their displays. I thought this was a particularly charming idea with its row of matched pots in ascending and descending sizes.

The artist below actually used dried flowers to create flat patterns that reminded me of Indian textiles with their bright colors and repeated motifs. The yellow one uses cosmos and the pink one at the right uses straw flowers. They are pressed paper thin in a hydraulic press. 

At the entrance to one of the tents were a pair of charming potager-style vegetable gardens by The Organic Gardner.

Craig Bergmann Landscape Design had one of their usual tour de force floral creations on display in the center of the tent. Can't you just fantasize doing this instead of the typical Christmas tree?

Maria Smithburg with Manfredini Landscape and Design created a dramatic tulip walkway with glossy red cylindrical planters. 

Depending on where you stood, the effect of the display constantly changed.

The containers made me think of those painted red trunks in the garden of Jack Lenor Larsen's Long House (below). They both have that same element of scale and drama.

You can see through the doors that the next garden display was equally dramatic but in a much more subtle way.

The space down the center of this gallery has been home to many incredible displays over the years, including this one by William Heffernan Landscapes.

I liked the combination of fantasy with the mirrored reflections and practicality with decorative squares of edible plants. I noticed that someone had added a small square of pink paper on the sign at the beginning of this garden with the hand-written notation "cherry trees." Clearly they'd been getting a lot of questions about the pink branches!

Since there were vendors in the hallways outside the conservatories we took advantage of the location and strolled through three different growing environments.

I've been reading a lot of interior design and decor books lately and the plants above and below both suggested color and texture combinations for paint and fabrics to my eye. 

My other posts on this event:

CBG Antiques and Garden Fair

CBG Antiques Fair: Inside the Tents 

Back yard whimsy

A local gardener who is also a quilter had her textile handiwork imaginatively displayed in her garden on a recent visit.

This totem, however, was my favorite object in her garden and one of the most creative things I've seen in any garden. It was a retirement gift made for her by staff and some of the students at Malcolm Shabazz High School in Madison. They also presented her with an accompanying book. 

Playing in the tea house

Last Thursday, we hosted the annual High Tea fundraiser for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection in the School of Human Ecology at UW-Madison. We spent a lot of time in the last month re-arranging our art, objects and textiles to showcase everything to its best effect.

Mark decided that he would hang one of our favorite fiber pieces — a large tsutsugaki boro noren — from the edge of the roof across the front of the teahouse. I bought Mark this Japanese shop sign as a 60th birthday present and it hung on our library wall for a long time; though lately it's been rolled up in acid-free tissue paper and stored under the bed. You can see for yourself that it fits the tea house perfectly and makes a beautiful garden feature look even better.

The next big project is to do the fine carpentry work needed to finish off the interior of the tea house. This is something that Mark is considering hiring a professional woodworker to do; someone who will perhaps let Mark assist him.

Mark is still undecided about how to complete the doors and windows of the tea house, which you can see are currently framed in with plastic sheeting. That part of this long-term project will require some looking, some reading and planning, to say nothing of the actual construction work for those entities. And he needs to deal with the water and electric lines which are marked as "off limits" by two pairs of bamboo pyramids.

But in the meantime, Mark decided to take advantage of this special occasion to get a rough idea of how the interior will look once it is all done. He brought out a few of the objects that will eventually call the tea house home to display them in place — if only briefly. 

Even with no floor matting in place and lots of fine detail work still to be accomplished, I was thrilled at the impact these few furnishings provided. And it certainly gave all our visitors a glimpse of the next stage in the garden's future. 

The Great Piece of Turf

After I paired a collection of Mark's pictures of white plants with Whistler's painting, "Symphony in White," Barbara H., a longtime reader of this blog, noted that Arisaema sikokianum reminded her of Munch's painiting, "The Scream." That comment made me wonder how many other plants had some kind of relationship to art works. 

Mark immediately pointed out that the photo he'd just taken of our weedy "meadow" was reminsicent of "The Great Piece of Turf," a watercolor masterpiece by Albrech Durer. Durer's work is a study of a seemingly random group of wild plants, including dandelion and greater plantain. How many other plant/art combinations we can find in the garden remains to be seen.

Grow it forward

To celebrate Spring, Timber Press is having an "Edibles Contest" which closes this Friday. They are giving away a great gardening package that includes organic heirloom vegetable seeds, a bare root fruit tree and an "edibles library" of wonderful Timber Press books. I rarely enter contests and I don't have enough sun or space to grow food in my garden.

But while reading about this contest, I discovered the fantastic garden poster below (from a different heirloom seed contest). The poster — by Joe Wirtheim — is from the Victory Garden of Tomorrow which offers a whole series of great garden images as offset prints, screen prints, postcards and on t-shirts. Check them out; I think you will fall in love with their retro design style!

I am receiving no remuneration for this announcement; just love the art and want to spread the word.

Red twigs

One of the benefits of an early Spring visit to Olbrich Botanical Gardens is that you can see and enjoy all the backbone plantings of the garden. Trees and shrubs and grasses stand out in all their glory when there are no flowers to distract you. And nothing shines like the colorful stems of dogwoods and willows ... and a few other unexpectedly bright branches.

Four fabulous ideas ...

to enjoy, to re-interpret in your own garden or to just plain steal outright. These are the images that have stayed with me from the 2010 Olbrich Botanical Gardens Home and Garden Tour, that Mark and I went on more than a week ago. And just as I suspected, going with others — in this case our friends Dennis and Mary — meant that I saw more memorable vignettes than I would ever have noticed on my own! Extra pairs of eyes may be the gardener's most important design tool.

 

 

 

A Day in the Country

HE SAID: I woke up Thursday morning to a pot of hot coffee and ginger scones drizzled with honey, all served on the deck with the New York Times. There were also a couple of lovely anniversary presents: "Love Poems from the Japanese" translated by Kenneth Rexroth and a CD called "Class of 38," a compilation of works by composers born in 1938. Some of them — William Bolcom, John Harbison, Gloria Coates, Charles Wouorinen — I know and like. The others I'm anxious to hear. (I'm listening to the music as I write this.)

Because she had suggested pottery, I told Linda that she'd have to pick out her present herself. So, after spending the bulk of the morning lazing on the deck, enjoying the garden, we grabbed the checkbook and a camera and headed out of town. There's a bridge being re-consructed on County B, our normal route to Heather's (above). As a result we were forced to take some unfamiliar roads — always a treat; but we needn't have worried about getting lost. "Heather" had placed classy signs at nearly every intersection guiding us to her joint overlooking the river in Rockdale.

I'm not a motorcycle fan. I've always thought that it wouldn't take me any time at all to kill myself if I ever tried to ride one. But this beauty in the parking lot of Heather's nearly took my breath away. I can understand why someone would want to ride a work of art. It almost seemed a desecration to have to put something as mundane as a license plate on it.

After Linda finished her burger and I my tenderloin sandwich and fries special (the Thursday special), we drove a mile or so down "B", past Dilemma Road and turned in at the sign for Cambridge Wood Fired Pottery. 

The address of Mark Skudlarek's pottery studio and home is "Tranquil Lane", and I don't believe there was ever a more appropriately named street. It is, in fact, more of a very long gravel driveway since they are the only ones who live on the lane; but it is a charming and tranquil place to visit.

Mark met us as we got out of the truck with his usual winning smile and enthusiastic handshake. When we mentioned that it was our anniversary he said that he and his wife Gaia had married within months of us. Mark and I also both graduated from St. John's in Minnesota, although some years apart. We spent the obligatory half hour catching up on personal news and politics before we excused ourselves to do some shopping in his indoor and outdoor sales areas while he went back to work throwing pots.

An earlier post had gotten Linda and I talking about art in the garden and how Mark's big pots looked so good almost anywhere we placed them. We decided then that we would think about adding at least one more big pot to our garden collection.

One of the reason's we are so enamored of Mark's work is that it is wood fired. The process is one that a 15th century Japanese artisan would be very familiar with. With very few exceptions, such as the modern pyrometer for measuring the extremely high temperatures reached in the kiln, very little has changed in the last 500 years. It still requires lots of wood and the patience and endurance to feed a fire continuously for three, five, or sometimes more days.

Mark's is a multi-chambered kiln, and he mentioned that he was rebuilding the third chamber. (The kiln is located under the roof behind the woodpiles and takes up most of the length of that space). While we were checking that out we were distracted by their chickens

Penned at night for their protection, during the day they roam around the studio and kiln shed. They didn't seem the least bit afraid of us

Linda was clearly smitten with the texture on this urn, and I certainly wouldn't have objected if she had decided that it was the one. But when we rejoined Mark in his studio he showed us three even larger pots he was working on. He explained how he had devised a way to add a makeshift concrete fly wheel to a commercial banding wheel to make a (not so) crude kick wheel for smoothing coil-built pots more efficiently.

Since his next firing is less than a month away, we decided to put off a decision until we saw these new works finished. 

By the time we got home we each had just enough time to get ready for work. But it was, by all accounts, a lovely way to spend an anniversary.

SHE SAID: Mark Skudlarek has his own beautiful Web site where you can see pictures of his pots and the firing process which is pretty amazing in a wood-fired kiln like his. The site also has a link to his Etsy online shop.

My garden odyssey: Art of the garden (concluded)

EPISODE XXXIV

HE SAID: Last week you said that an object is right when it works with the garden as a whole. What did you mean by that?

SHE SAID: Well, i remember early on that we spent a lot of time discussing the notions of East and West. When we were designing the Tsukubai, for instance, we had some fairly heated discussions about how "authentic" we should try to make it...

HE SAID: ...knowing full well that the term "authentic" would never apply to our garden as a Japanese garden.

SHE SAID:  So I said, why try. Why not draw from whatever influences attracted us but not be constrained by some other culture's definition of a garden.

HE SAID: I think that's when I first started using the word "analog" to describe a structure that is similar in function but one that evolved out of another culture. Like using copper piping for the flume in the Tsukubai instead of the traditional bamboo...

SHE SAID: ...or turning the English chimney pot into a lantern.

HE SAID: But, now that we have several more traditional looking lanterns, I'm not sure I feel the same way about the chimney pot. It's still a great garden ornament with a wonderful shape and patina, but does it still work as a lantern analog?

SHE SAID:  My point is: it doesn't have to. What's that old saying — consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds?

HE SAID: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." — Emerson (I looked it up.) But doesn't a certain amount of consistency make sense, contribute to the feeling of unity or wholeness we claim to be after.

SHE SAID:  Well, a couple of thoughts suggest themselves. One, I think we need to trust our instincts. We've made good decisions in the past, for the most part; and when we've been wrong, we've had the courage to admit it and banish the misfit object. And two, we're both artists. Why shouldn't we have art in our garden, real art which challenges its surroundings?

HE SAID: I don't know. I still think that the garden, as an artwork, should take precedence over art objects that are added to the garden.

SHE SAID:  Which brings us back to where we started: "an object is right when it works with the garden as a whole."

HE SAID: Do you think the crane is too much of a cliche?

SHE SAID:  I think we should give it a rest!

My garden odyssey: Art of the garden (continued)

EPISODE XXXIII

SHE SAID: I think we should talk about some of the things that are actually in our garden — you know, the man-made things you wanted to get rid of a couple of weeks ago.

HE SAID: I didn't really want to throw them all out; but I thought we should try to see them as others might, without our emotional attachment. The Valentine piece, for instance ...

SHE: It's staying!

HE: I made this piece for Linda one summer while she was away attend an art class in Door County, Wisconsin, as an out-of-season valentine. It consists of three discarded industrial saw blades of the type used to make cuts in concrete pavement. On them, I wrote "I Love You" in German ("Ich Liebe Dich") using a commercial rust inhibitor.

HE: Calm down; I'm not suggesting we get rid of it. But — honestly — how does it connect to our garden?

SHE: Well ... it's round like the window you're planning for the Tea House, and the Moon Garden and the circle around the Mica rock.

We bought this red rock which is riddled with mica because we couldn't resist. But when it came time to place it in the garden, we found that it didn't "fit" anywhere; it was too dramatic. Rather than trying to make it blend in, we finally decided to frame it within a circle of ivy.

HE: And it does have that nicely rusty surface which qualifies it for Wabi-Sabi status. But what is it doing there? What does it contribute to the overall vision of the garden?

SHE: I think it adds mystery, and poetry. It's never seemed to bother you when Ian Finlay added textual elements to his garden. Am I wrong, or aren't you quite fond of Little Sparta?

HE: OK, OK. But that was the whole point of his garden — the classical literary allusions. Do you think that it still works if we only have the one piece of text?

SHE: In our case, it's not the text that's important; it's the inclusion of objects that are compatible with the garden as a whole. 

This was a pipe standard for a basketball backboard and basket that was set in concrete next to the driveway when we bought the house. We tried, without success, to turn it into a garden sculpture. 

HE: Remember how we struggled with the baskeball standard? You so desperately wanted that to work as sculpture; and no matter what we tried, what color we painted it, where we placed it, we were never happy with it. 

SHE: Unlike the obelisk, which has always looked great no matter how you configured it or where we put it.

This sculpture is made of 84 pieces of limestone recycled from a building project on the University of Wisconsin campus. Mark cut each pair of pieces slightly smaller that the next which gave them a gradual taper as they were stacked. Beginning with an obelisk arrangement, this is the third different stacking pattern we've used as the sculpture has been moved from place to place.

HE: Which reminds me, I've been thinking it's about time I tried something new with it.

SHE: Not until you get the Tea House finished! And maybe not even then, as the area around it has now all been landscaped using it as a focal point.

HE: Getting back to the subject, what about the cello piece?

This is a cast iron form used to make 3/4 size cellos. We found it at a local shop — "Unearthed" — that specializes in recycled industrial products for the home.

SHE: I like it.

HE: I don't know. I find it somehow too literal, not literary, but concrete, for the garden. I'd like to try it inside. I think music is more of an indoor idea.

SHE: What about the bells? We've got what, eight bells in the garden? What's the difference?

Paolo Soleri casts these bells and sells them to support Arcosanti, an "ecological human habitat" he's been building in Arizona since 1970.

HE: Well the bells are as much about the sound as they are about their form. They're about interacting — with the wind in the case of the Soleri bells — and with people for the ones that need to be struck to make a sound. The cello, for me, is about the contradictions: the heavy iron version of a delicate instrument, pitted rust versus polished wood.

SHE: I'm willing to give it a try inside. Oh, and I thought of something else that works that's round — our ceramic platters.

A wood-fired stoneware platter, by Mark Skudlarek of Cambridge Woodfired Pottery near Cambridge, Wisconsin, hangs outside our backdoor. (It is 18 inches in diameter).

HE: I won't argue with you about that. There's something about wood-fired ceramics that just seems to be a natural in the garden. 

SHE: How long ago was it that I took you out to Mark Skudlarek's to see his big pots?

HE: And we came home with the biggest one he had.

Wood-fired pot by Mark Skudlarek, approximately 24 inches high.

SHE: And never regretted it.