The Artful Environment

As threatened, here are momentary thoughts on GARDEN and life ART .

First– I am the kind of person who has crap really great and important stuff everywhere.  It drives Jim crazy.  It may be the reason why I am crazy.  Shall I post a poll?

I hang stuff on doorknobs, I pile stuff on the steps… heck, I pile stuff everywhere!!!  My windowsills and frames and picture frames and any other spot that I can claim as mine, are covered with little shrines of said stuff.  Little parades of the ephemera of my life.  Kids sculpey creations, rocks, marbles,nature, tiny stuff, candles, bits of this and that.  It’ sort of the same way outside.

Is it not written–the way you do anything is the way you do everything.  This pop philosphy both comforts and terrifies me. I find it both a measure of truth and a measure of where I need to examine/change the way I do things.  I am such a creature of habit– though I love the excitement of change. It’s such an easy slide down the slope to that wise-guy Einstein who (maybe) said that Insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.   It all makes a difference. Every. Thing. We. Do.  I am voting for change everywhere, my own little world included!

Anyhow– skipping analysis of the ALL of my life, the GARDEN is full of stuff.  And I like it like that.  Stuff in trees , stuff on sticks, stuff.  I like to think it not so like Sanford and son, but more in the realm of art and memory and visions that have inspired me like Derek Jarmon’s lovely garden.

Yeah– I am a lot more wabi-slobby.  But it still is part of the garden magic for me.  My gnomes, and kids art and shells that I dutifully put away in the Fall each year and bring out again in the Spring.  The things I would have out there if I had real magic and money were dirt.  ( see Gypsy Vardo on ebay)  Anyhow, I love my garden and the outside world of this house.  The barn and docks of Jim, all of the little nooks and crannies, the front yard as food garden/weed farm.

My friend Peg has been working on a wonderful sculpture for us  inspired by the Helligan Giant.   This the Heligan version–

Here he is blooming.

I’d like to visit that garden some day.

Our is more of a non-botanical garden scale.  Just right for us.   It makes me smile everytime I go out to the back-world.

The birth of our mud/moss-person is  a long evolution, which I love, because it means gets worked on now and then while we visit and have tea.  I sort of hope that it never is really ” done” but keeps evolving through time and our friendship. It’s lovely.  It grew hair recently.

Lovely variagated green hair with purple highlights.

I’ll continue to post the changes, and thank you Pegella.  We love it.

I have an ongoing collection of Garden-as-sculpture images.  Here are a few that I’d love to share with you, they fit right in with our lovely garden head.

This beauty won the 2006 Chelsea Flower Show in London.  I think it was called “Garden of Dreams”.  So nice. The sculptors were Sue and Peter Hill, who have done other, similarly gorgeous works.

Belinda Villani

2 hysterical mentions:

( this biggest chia pet evah!)

I could go on and on..

A piece that really touched my heart was this prayer hut at the 2007 Bioneers conference in CA.

Environmental artist, sculptor and Santa Cruz firefighter ( !) Wendy Domster made this amazing piece.  It was created from a field of leek blossoms from an ‘excess crop’ that would have otherwise been just plowed under.

“It was a “gratitude hut”, with a dark interior where you could go to sit and ponder the miracles of your life, and remember what you were most grateful for. Inside it was full of ‘milagros’ or little charms and notes hanging from the walls in representation of all those miracles.”  I love the idea of this…all of it.

I bet it was a pretty pungent pondering in that hut.

Off to bed now.  Thankful.