A gallery of pots and skillful color play remind us that gardening itself is an art, at DIG.

fter two years working on a book about artists' gardens, I have emerged from the manuscript convinced that garden making is in itself a fine art. Look at the sheer creativity, ingenuity and talent involved in a garden, not to mention the glorious results in leaf and flower.

Aesthetic principles abound in gardening.

Gardeners work in three dimensions; we are creating sculpture every time we prune a branch. This is especially obvious in the stylization of bonsai, or the artificiality of topiary, but also in the lines of any tree mindfully pruned over time.

"All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration," writes Ray Bradbury in "Zen in the Art of Writing." "An artist learns what to leave out." And an adept pruner knows which branch to take off and which to leave for the future health and shape of the tree.

Then there is the raw material, the "paint box" of the garden, the whole palette of plants, forms, colors and textures that attracted most of us to gardening in the first place. Using plants as a medium requires the same kind of knowledge and discernment that an artist brings to the choice of metal, stone or pigments. As a sculptor may shape raw material into three- dimensional form, we grow our garden sculptures over time, using imagination and skill to envision and influence the final results. Think of the fabulous range of architectural plants we have in our kit of raw materials - cardoons, phormiums, agaves, yuccas, ornamental grasses.

One of the numerous attempts to define art in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary speaks of "works of art collectively . . . a museum of art; an art collection." Often it is not the specific piece of art, or plant, but how it is arranged in concert with other elements that raises it to the level of art.

Sylvia Matlock's fine-arts background shows in her arrangement of planted pots into a "gallery" at DIG, her nursery on Vashon Island. She thinks of her icy blue and green plant-filled pots, arranged atop pedestals of varying heights, as "organic sculpture" that changes with the season. Color artistry is magnified by the confines of pot planting, and Matlock makes the most of it, with striking combinations such as a sea-green pot filled with red kale, eucalyptus, black mondo grass and the silvery blades of Helichrysum 'Icicles.'

"I'm a firm believer that gardening is an art, and if you miss the artful, you miss a big part of it," Matlock says. DIG customers pick up on the idea right away, circling the display as thoughtfully as if attending First Thursday, many commenting that DIG's plant gallery looks so European. (Why, if it is artful, must it come from across the ocean?)

We are often so busy weeding that we overlook the variety of artistic principles inherent in garden-making. Garden historian Mac Griswold called gardening "the slowest of the performing arts." And it is true that gardens, like performances, can be dramatic, and are always ephemeral. We have much in common with installation artists, who focus on creating atmosphere and movement through space. We deal in the auditory when we add moving water to the garden, or encourage bird song. Most artists deal with ethics on some level, and so do gardeners. What we do in our gardens affects the health of creatures, air and water; millions of gardeners bring life to their plots (or kill it off) with their gardening practices.

Finally, when we make personally meaningful gardens (and really, what's the point of any other kind?) we are indulging in myth-making. Gardeners may think they are concentrating on the practicalities, or on the visuals, but we are really telling stories out there in the dirt, composing our autobiographies. Valerie Easton is a horticultural librarian and writes about plants and gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine. Her e-mail address is vjeaston@aol.com 

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Now In Bloom: A favorite early December task is stringing outdoor Christmas lights between the frilly flowers of Camellia sasanqua `Jean May.' A floppy evergreen shrub that can be trained as an espalier, its glossy leaves show off pale pink blossoms from November through January.