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Plant Life Valerie Easton

The Art-ful Garden

With paint or pebbles, glass or wood, we can make more beauty

Everyone can be an artist in their own garden. Mostly what we're doing out there is a big experiment anyway, so why not dabble in art as well as plants? We play around with soil and seeds, so it's not a huge stretch to glass, pebbles, wood and paint. And because most gardens beg for focal points, art can serve a purpose.

Besides, a piece of art stays put through the seasons while plants emerge, grow, flower, fruit and die down around it.

Whether it's humor or our aesthetic ideals, we can express it all in the garden. A few suggestions:

• Last summer, I was bugged by persistent hammering outside my study window. Turns out my neighbors were building a blue-bottle tree. Now every shade of azure glows in the sun near their back fence. The bottle tree, as you can imagine, is a real conversation starter. The couple collected blue bottles, mostly water and vodka, from the local transfer station and stuck them onto nails driven into a tall pole to make what they call their "Poor Man's Chihuly."

• Don't you just want to take off your shoes and give yourself a free reflexology treatment every time you see a pebble mosaic? This ancient art is easier to make than it looks, and brings year-round texture and pattern to the garden. Gillian Mathews, owner of Ravenna Gardens, plucked up her courage to make her own mosaics after taking a class from Portland master Jeff Bale. She recommends "The Complete Pebble Mosaic Handbook" by Maggy Howarth (Firefly Books, $24.95) for inspiration and technique. She buys Mexican beach pebbles in 50-pound bags from Lakeview Stone near University Village.

Among the tips she offers: 1) Because pebbles are set on their sides, it takes many more than you'd think. 2) Leave yourself plenty of time, because this is one time-consuming project. 3) Do as she did and turn the mosaic project into a party, inviting friends to help make the work go faster. 4) Cloudy days are best because sun makes the mortar dry too fast. 5) Have a plan before you start. A template drawn to scale helps.

• On Whidbey Island, my favorite public art is the library-look window boxes behind Moonraker, the bookstore on the main street of Langley. Maybe only a librarian like me would get quite so excited about these. But even if you haven't longed for facsimiles of books in your garden, these are great-looking window boxes. I tracked down artist/gardener Becky Duthie, who makes these original pieces. How'd she get the idea? "It's my crazy imagination," says Duthie, who browsed the bookstore to find the titles and authors she used on the boxes.

Duthie begins with simple rectangular wooden window boxes. From the hardware store, she buys strips of finishing wood in different thicknesses and widths to form the spines of the books. Then comes the fun of painting the "books" with enamel paint before writing the titles on their spines. Duthie has great fun with the words, using puffy, glittery and metallic pens and paint. She attaches the books to the box with Gorilla Glue and small finishing nails. She sprays the whole planter with varnish to preserve it, before adding soil and plants.

Each book spine is unique, with the resulting look of an especially enticing library shelf. But filled with flowers. If you make your own library window boxes you can choose all your favorite books to go on them. But if this sounds like too much work, Duthie accepts custom orders; contact her at zoezain@yahoo.com.

These are just a few ideas to jog your creativity into coming up with art projects that suit your talent, taste and garden. Gardens have so much sheer life force, they can't help but inspire our creativity if we let them. And since the best gardens are unpretentious, the whole idea of making our own garden art shouldn't intimidate.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "A Pattern Garden." Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.

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