Gardening and art

  As the children of avid gardeners, sisfish and I spent many boring hours being dragged around nurseries and wishing that we were watching movies instead. Of course we were always happy to play outside in the beautiful gardens that were the result of these trips, but I always thought gardening was a grubby, consuming kind of hobby that looked like a lot of hard work.

It is all that, but now that I am older and have my own garden, I have realised that there is enormous pleasure in creating an environment that in many ways seems closer to my ideal of art than all the dead images in all the heavy frames in all the museums of the world.

A garden is a living, growing, constantly changing space that fully engages all the senses; the heavy white sweetness of night jasmine or the peppery cinnamon scent of carnations; the sound of birds and the vibrations of bees; the papery touch of poppy petals or the sharp thorns of roses, the sour acid of just-ripe blackberries. Although vegetable gardens are very utilitarian and useful, I confess to loving flowers in all their forms, so my gardens mostly feed the senses rather than the stomach.

A garden also combines the formal concerns that define traditional painting, architecture and sculpture: color, texture, form, mass, height, scale etc. What makes a garden more interesting though is that these qualities change with the seasons, so planting a perfect spring garden doesn’t necessarily mean that the same garden will still be lovely in the fall. Gardens take time, sometimes years. Some plants only start flowering after three years. I am always very impatient, but making a garden has taught me to be (just a little) more patient, and now I am grateful for all the boring visits to nurseries during my childhood. I think I must have absorbed some knowledge by osmosis!