Artists in
their Gardens

In Anne Hirondelle's garden, a clipped boxwood hedge sets off the gently curved silhouette of a tall ceramic vessel and the pale pink fluffs of chenille-like Polygonum bistorta 'Superbum.'

Nothing is ordinary or expected in Ginny Ruffner's garden: a glass torso lights the way down a garden pathway.

That gardening is an art is obvious to all who have a passion for making the earth bear beautiful things. But that artists - artists adept in nonhorticultural media as opposed to landscape designers - practice this art with extraordinary results in their own back yards is perhaps less obvious.

Yes, everyone knows about Monet's garden at Giverny and a lot of noise was made over conceptual artist Robert Irwin's garden design for Southern California's Getty Center when it was opened in 1998. But these gardens are considered to be unique - wonderful aberrations, remarkable crossings of creative currents.

Yet the truth is that scores of artists with a patch of ground and an itch to cultivate it are creating amazing gardens all around us: in tiny city back yards, behind fences, beside the sea, beneath dense stands of Douglas firs, on steep hillsides, in odd corners of commuter islands and semi-rural retreats, along busy urban streets and in ordinary suburban back yards.

These are gardens that no conventional landscape designer would touch with a 10-foot pole: messy (or remarkably tidy), exuberant, quirky, full of mystery, strange objects, unheard of combinations of plants, dauntless experiments with scale and flashes of pure originality.

Above all, these are gardens that reflect the creative temperaments of the artists who make them and live in them: painters, architects, sculptors, glass artists, musicians, multimedia artists, artists whose medium is their garden.

"Artists in their Gardens" profiles 12 Northwest artists and the gardens they have made - or rather are in the continual process of making - for their own enjoyment. Text and pictures are excerpted from chapters profiling Ruffner and ceramicist Anne Hirondelle of Port Townsend and their singular, very different gardens.

Ginny Ruffner in her garden. The orange bells of Abutilon and the spiky blades of Phormium thrive alongside glass bells in the warmth of Ruffner's sheltered courtyard garden.

The Continuity and Intrigue of All Things: The Amazing Garden of Ginny Ruffner

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON wrote a little poem for children entitled "Happy Thought" that consists of just two lines: "The world is so full of a number of things, / I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings." This simple expression could be the motivating principle behind the explosion of creativity, the marvel of inspiration, the glorious excessiveness of world-renowned glass artist Ginny Ruffner's multimedia art and her garden. Her aesthetic is one of appreciation, broad acceptance and integration.

"I believe in the continuity and intrigue of all things - that comes from my art and extends to the garden," explains Ruffner. When asked which colors are her favorites, Ruffner explodes: ". . . - I never met a color I didn't like! It depends on what a plant does - they're all different, just like people, just like a piece of art. How could I choose which color I like best? It's crazy - which finger do I like best? It's like in the book 'Sophie's Choice' - how to choose? I can't think of anything I don't like except maybe blackberry vines." Slugs? None have found their way into the warm, sheltered microclimate of her courtyard garden, enclosed on all four sides by fences and the brick walls of her home and studio.

Both Ruffner's art and her garden are celebrations of profusion - every color diffused into tints and hues, a melange of motifs, a nurseryman's dream of plants, and a mind-boggling assemblage of media. "My whole life, all the space is filled - I have so much stuff it spilled out there," explains Ruffner of the eclectic mix of plants and art squeezed into her small garden. "I like to integrate objects of beauty with plants. People tend to view art in too precious a light, and maybe they don't view plants as precious enough.

Ruffner learned to love plants growing up in Atlanta, tutored by a gardening grandmother. "She could make anything grow," says Ruffner, "she was so Southern." Climbing roses, honeysuckle and jasmine fill Ruffner's garden, twine about the gargantuan "Goddess of Beauty" sculpture, and climb up old brick to surround second-story windows and balconies. Their fragrance and lush textures create an oasis reminiscent of the Old South, transplanted to the mixed-use northwest Seattle neighborhood of taverns, car dealers, shops, residences and restaurants known as "old Ballard."

This harking back to childhood plants must be the only thing the least bit old-fashioned about Ruffner. Her small frame topped by a tangle of bedroom-hair corkscrew curls in gold, red and gray, she radiates energy and intelligence and purpose. She wears blue jeans, a paint-splotched black T-shirt, multicolored cat anklets and black sneakers fastened with the kind of spiral glitter laces usually reserved for 4-year-old girls. You can count on dangly, funky earrings half-hidden by the pouf of hair.

"My whole life, all the space is filled," says Ruffner of her eclectic aesthetic, which prevails indoors as well as out in the garden.

Ruffner earned a master's in fine arts from the University of Georgia in 1975, moved to Seattle in 1984 and taught at the Pilchuck Glass School until 1991. In that year, her whirlwind of a life included the presidency of the Glass Art Society, curating a major glass show at the Tacoma Art Museum, and working as a member of the Seattle Arts Commission and a trustee of the Pilchuck Glass School. She had three solo art exhibitions and 14 group shows, in museums from Japan to Michigan. Most amazingly, Ruffner and her assistants created about 60 new pieces of art, from glass sculptures to paintings and public-art installations, some of which found their way into the hands of private collectors or into museums in Australia, Germany, Switzerland and France, as well as the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum among others here in the United States. That was the year 1991.

In 1992, Ruffner was involved in a head-on car accident while driving her parents' Thunderbird in North Carolina. The right half of her brain was severed from the left, and she was in a coma for five months. The doctors didn't expect her to recover. But her prodigious energy and will prevailed. Ruffner now walks again, albeit slowly, and though her speech is a bit painstaking, it is vivid with lively perspicacity. She recently finished a remodel of her home and studio, an old brick building that has grown organically ("It is always in a state of transformation," explains Ruffner) to more than 3,000 feet of working and living space that completely encloses the garden on two levels. Her energy and spirit are evident when she laughs about how guests at a housewarming party celebrating the completed remodel gave each other "body shots" - drinking tequila out of each other's navels. Ruffner's favorite housewarming gift was a basket of Barbie dolls with wild hairdos. The basket of naked, mop-topped Barbies now sits atop a bookcase holding Redoute's Roses as well as an eclectic mix of books on masks, shoes, shells, Botticelli, lace, textiles, sculpture, Currier & Ives. The collection provides clues to many motifs found in her garden and in her art: hands, grapes, vines, sumptuousness, shoes, the human heart, mystery, intrigue, romance, the buzz.

Ruffner's art often repeats the theme of containment, with elements such as glass balls displayed inside metal cages and bowls. She has brought this sense of enclosure to her garden, which started as an empty, weedy lot with a fence on two sides. In four years, she enlarged her building to two stories on three sides of the garden, with a solid, arbor-topped fence finishing off the fourth side. "In my house I love a feeling of - I wouldn't say safety, but coziness, of an embracing feeling, and you do that through scale," explains Ruffner. "We are 3-D objects in space, and this affects how we relate to what's around us." Inside the studio, rose-petal-encrusted shapes floating overhead emphasize height and possibilities of space; outside climbing vines and overhanging balconies emphasize the volume of space in the garden. A sweep of twisted, filigreed metal goes up an entire side of the building, serving as support for a lusty 'Cecile Brunner' rose that climbs to encircle second-story windows. A row of six rusty pergolas clothed in roses makes walking along a stone pathway an exercise in shade and sunlight, in fragrance and enclosure. A fluff of a tree fern spreads its elegant fronds, as lovely to look down on from the windows above as to sit beneath. Along the fence a raised bed holds arches of red `Taboo' roses and blades of spiky iris. Rough-barked Douglas fir trunks ("It stopped traffic in Ballard when I had those delivered," laughs Ruffner) support the balconies that overhang the courtyard, which in turn hold pots of flowers and vines that trail down to the garden below.

Now all of this, with the scent of jasmine and roses filling the air, could evoke a charming Southern scene; but look a little closer and you'll get a whiff not so much of Charlestonian elegance but of the startlingly eccentric charm of the Savannah depicted in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." In the center of the garden is the 4-foot-high concrete head of Ruffner's "Goddess of Beauty" (purchased at a garden store), to which Ruffner has added huge steel wings that she describes as "weighing a ton, but not looking like they do." The wings are an elegant filigree of leaf, spiral and other lively entwined shapes, curving out from the back of the goddess's head as if in preparation for flight. These same tendril-like shapes are repeated in the vines growing throughout the garden, in Ruffner's glass art, and, come to think of it, atop Ruffner's own curly head. "Any cube of space needs a center, a heart, an anchor, and in this case a muse," is how Ruffner explains the placement of her outsized goddess. And, as with all else in the Ruffner aesthetic, the goddess is embellished to the max. A collar of white impatiens frames her face, a fluffy hat of red impatiens is worthy of an Easter parade. As you stroll through this always-surprising garden, you are watched over by her brooding face, furthering the sense of safety and seclusion. It is just you and the goddess - and of course a riotous medley of colorful, fragrant plants, and perhaps the resident black-and-white cat, Studley.

In one corner of the garden a cushioned bench sits beneath a pergola nearly devoured by a honeysuckle vine. On a nearby table stands Ruffner's prize plant, a narrow, prickly crown-of-thorns, grown from a bit of a plant owned by her grandmother. This tiny corner, nestled against brick and shielded by a scented vine, invites one to curl up with a book, sip a tall iced tea, bask in garden tradition. But what is seeping from beneath the nearby fence? A river of bubbles seems to be emerging, flowing across the stone patio, passing the pots of Abutilon, boxwood, and begonias to dribble down the black marble steps into the shade of the overhanging balconies. These flowing bubbles are actually a collection of glass balls crafted by Ruffner, some transparent, some translucent, arranged so that they grow smaller in size as they reach the lower levels of the garden.

The good horticulture going on in the garden, as well as some of the weirdness, is provided by Ben Hammontree, Ruffner's gardener, who lives in one of the second-story apartments overlooking the courtyard garden. "Ben is a Southern boy, too," explains Ruffner. "I love unusual plants, and he always brings me something new and odd - he likes the weird stuff." Hammontree is known in the Northwest for his "banana canna tropicana" style of gardening, and his hand can be spotted in the vibrant colors and the fatly bladed, striped `Tropicana' cannas that embolden the garden. What chance could there be that two gardeners could be found who would share such an over-the-top aesthetic? Ruffner says it works because they share the garden. "We call it our garden - that's how I like to work." Perhaps this sharing of the task and the results is born of glass artistry, which is a communal venture, and of the fact that, as Ruffner is quick to point out, she accomplishes so much due to the help of her talented assistants.

"The garden is magic to me, and wonderfully amazing," marvels Ruffner. When she's asked if planning new plantings, or working or sitting in the garden, brings a respite from her art, Ruffner is astonished at the idea. "It would be like taking a respite from breathing," she exclaims. "The garden is art."

Anne Hirondelle at work in her garden studio. Inspiration for both the color and texture of Hirondelle's ceramic work comes directly from nature, as in these bark-textured, gourd-like pots.

Spatial composition:
The garden rooms of ceramicist Anne Hirondelle

THE SHELVES in ceramic artist Anne Hirondelle's studio hold tidy rows and clusters of feathers, stones, tiny bird skeletons, nests, pods and cones. Their colors and forms are touchstones for Hirondelle's art, as they were for another artist who collected skulls, rocks, bones, and feathers, Georgia O'Keeffe. The voluptuous, dreamlike imagery of O'Keeffe's paintings couldn't be more distant aesthetically from the subtle, traditional clay vessels crafted by Anne Hirondelle, nor could the two artists' backgrounds be more different. O'Keeffe was born in the Midwest and spent her later life in her beloved New Mexican desert; Hirondelle grew up in Western Oregon and now lives less than a mile from the sea, in Port Townsend, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. Yet for both, the artistic impulse flows from the poetry inherent in natural objects, and the simplicity and purity of these forms are expressed in both women's art, as well as in Hirondelle's garden."

It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things," said O'Keeffe in 1922. Hirondelle has created a hushed, calm, Zen-like oasis of a garden by just such ruthless elimination of anything that doesn't match her strong, simple aesthetic. In her elegantly composed garden, warmed by the onshore flow of moist air from nearby Puget Sound, plants have been selected with as much care as the objects on her studio shelves. Bright colors, showy forms, vivid ornamentation, flash, dash - all these have been avoided in the garden as well as in the studio. Colors are pared down to the subtle and natural, form is pure and sculptural. Richness comes not from elaboration or decoration but from the atmosphere of spaces contained, separate yet flowing. Hirondelle has created a series of garden rooms by dividing space into separate compartments as surely as the molded walls of her ceramic vessels divide space into two distinct parts - volume contained and space remaining outside.

Dividing a garden into rooms with brick walls and solid hedging is a familiar British concept. But such scale and grandeur would be inappropriate to a garden in quaint Port Townsend, so Hirondelle has adopted the concept with a twist. She has cleverly enlarged the spaces of her garden by allowing them to spill out visually from behind hedges, between trees and fences; rather than creating solid barriers, she suggests separation to create distinct atmospheres. A split-rail fence stretches across the grass, but stops short of the edges. You can walk right around the end of the fence as well as see through it. Hirondelle uses this familiar form merely to suggest the division of space. A small grove of birches creates a vertical pattern of white-dappled trunks and a horizontal pattern of shade upon grass. The result of such simple manipulations of space is a garden of serenity.

Tranquility is created in part because of the near-perfection of every plant and every object. Each looks as if Hirondelle had deliberately selected it just for that spot: the lilies, euphorbias and azaleas thrive unshouldered by their neighbors, the little birch trees have plenty of room to grow to full size and their natural shape. "When I choose plants it is like everything else - I just choose what I like and then everything goes together OK because I like it." This philosophy is as deceptively simple as the garden itself, which is straightforward in its forms (mossy fence, hedges, old orchard, birch grove) but complex in emotional resonance. Hirondelle's garden is a place to linger, perhaps take a nap in the little grove of birches, or to pass through the gap in the fence on an Alice-in-Wonderland quest, just to see where it might lead. The fact that the lawn only leads around the corner to the old front porch dilutes the impact of the journey not a bit; it is the chance to pass through that archetypal form, open yet puzzling, that entices and enchants.

Economical of gesture and soft of voice, Hirondelle has a self-possessed, thoughtful manner perhaps bred of solitary hours in the studio and the garden. An unruffled, shiny cap of silver-gray hair cleanly outlines her small face and wide smile. She wears tidy overalls and T-shirts, in the same subdued grays and browns of the wasp nests and pine cones she collects. You'd never take her for a woman who once aspired to become an attorney. Years ago, Hirondelle remarked to a friend, "I'm either going to law school or I'm going to make pots." Her friend responded, "Remember, you can always eat out of pots." Hirondelle had degrees in English and counseling psychology; she'd directed a social agency in Seattle and then in the early '70s, she had decided to go to law school. The first day, she knew she'd made a mistake, but she stuck it out for a year, then quit to begin taking ceramics classes. She had always been drawn to clay's plasticity, its mutability. Then, as now, what intrigued her was creating shape and form from clay rather than adding decoration to the pots. (Nor does she decorate her garden.)

Examine the teapot. Hirondelle uses the traditional rounded, handled shape of a teapot for its symbolic function; her goal is to create forms that appear full, perhaps overflowing, with memories or sensations. "A teapot need not be full of tea to communicate the spirit or ritual of tea," she says. Vessels are the core metaphor in her ceramics, used as a visual link between the past and future. Her ceramic vessels, slightly oversized pieces derived from the forms of traditional functional pots, play with the shaping of space. Uptilted handles or the thrust of a spout are the only elements that disrupt the simple curves of the sensual vessels. Surfaces are bronze, gray or deep brown. She started by working with a variety of glazes, and now her work has evolved into architectural pieces that are exercises in pure form.

Iris pallida 'Aurea Variegata' presents a pleasing counterpoint to the smooth, round shapes of a trio of bowls set out to hold rainwater.

When Hirondelle and her husband, Bob Schwiesow, bought their old (circa 1902) farmhouse in a field on the Olympic Peninsula 20 years ago, the garden consisted of a cyclone fence and a vegetable garden with a cherry tree planted right in the center. It is an old garden, flat and grassy, the size of two city lots, in a neighborhood of small houses and big yards. Hirondelle began gardening to create some order, to bring a sense of passage and purpose to the space. She divided the lot into loosely defined "rooms" to make comfortable people-sized dimensions; there's an entry garden, a Zen garden, an orchard, a dining area. Attention to detail, shape and form distinguishes her garden as it does her ceramic art. In the garden you'll find nary a showy dahlia or gazing globe; instead, it's a pine tree limbed up to reveal the curve of its trunk, the swell of a rounded Rodgersia leaf, or the curve of a pot set in a flower bed that catches the eye, creates the meditative, Zen-like atmosphere that draws a visitor into the meditative mood.

Hirondelle quotes poet Stanley Kunitz to explain the importance of gardening in her life. "Gardening for me is the passionate effort to organize a little corner of the earth, which I want to redeem. The wish is to achieve control over your little plot so that it appears beautiful, distinguished - an equivalent of your signature in the natural world.

What Hirondelle describes as her "overwhelming need to order things visually - a three-dimensional ordering" is satisfied in the garden as well as at her potting wheel. This sense of controlling and ordering space, as well as Hirondelle's strong aesthetic preference for the simple and unpretentious, has determined the design and content of the garden. She is drawn to the structure of plants, choosing them for their line and architectural qualities. "I don't care what color they are," she explains, "I just want the leaf." It is very difficult for someone who loves plants to refine choices, to select just a few plants. Hirondelle's ability to pare down to form, to edit, to clearly see each individual element, has allowed her to create a garden of restful open spaces, devoid of overcrowding. Then, too, her precise planting is a result of limited funds: She has needed to wait to divide plants, and to buy trees and shrubs in small sizes.

Although her vessels begin with sketches on paper, she has never drawn plans for her garden, preferring to work it out in the dirt as she goes along. Hirondelle considers not only the space within her garden, but also the space beyond it, taking advantage of the Japanese concept of "borrowed scenery." She prunes an old laurel hedge straight across, just high enough so that it echoes the brick wall of the neighbor's house, forming a pleasing contrast of color and texture. As one looks across the lawn, the eye is drawn into a clear horizontal rhythm of long, low, mossy fences, followed by the higher green hedge, and beyond that a clipped row of red-leafed 'Thundercloud' plum trees. There is superb geometry hidden within the softness of the plantings. The forms of fence, hedge and trees are simple and distinct, varying in texture and color, graduated in height, and repetitious in clean horizontal line.

In an artist's version of the Southern tradition of "pass-along" plants, Hirondelle has traded what she makes for what she can't afford to buy, enjoying the chance to display the metal and ceramic work of other artists that she admires. She collects large ceramic vessels that she sets amidst the plantings, all as subtly colored as if they had grown up from the ground; beige, brown, soft gray, with muted finishes and crackled or rough textures. A dark metal "spirit stick" by artist friend Russell Jaqua punctuates a planting of azaleas and boxwood. Even her light-filled studio, set into the garden, was acquired through trade. Jim Cutler, the Bainbridge Island architect famous for designing Bill Gates's vast home compound on Lake Washington, offered to design the studio he'd heard she wanted in exchange for several pieces of her work. Hirondelle demurred, saying she needed something small and simple enough for her husband to build himself. Cutler persisted, designing a studio that Schwiesow was able to build. It is a beautiful little pitch-roof wooden structure, with paned windows, deep windowsills and plenty of light. Here Hirondelle sketches, throws and fires her ceramics, displays the natural objects from which she derives inspiration, and looks out upon the garden as she works.

"Artists in Their Gardens," copyright 2001 by Valerie Easton, David Laskin and Allan Mandell (Sasquatch Books, Seattle), $23.95. Reprinted by permission.

Valerie Easton is a horticultural librarian and writes about plants and gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine, including the weekly "Plant Life" column.

David Laskin is the author of numerous books and has written about gardeners and gardening for Seattle Weekly, The New York Times and Horticulture.