Topher Delaney's new minimalistic garden links two red-brick wings of the Portland Art Museum.

MODERN GARDENS, with their distinct departure from the familiar flowery English style, really penetrated my consciousness only a couple of years ago when I wrote about Terry Welch's Woodinville garden for this magazine.

Welch's garden is a naturalistic wildlife refuge with overtones of Asian culture and English landscape tradition. While gazing across Welch's beaver pond, listening to bird song and fish splash, I came to believe that modernity is far more than the sleek stainless steel, whimsical ornamentation or aggressive architecture injected into gardens to signify avant-garde. It is the essence of Welch's garden that is profoundly modern, the fusion of cultures and influences into a new thing that is uniquely of its own location. This melding of international symbols and aesthetics, as well as Welch's reverence for the land, its history and its creatures, strikes me as modernism for the 21st century.

Nevertheless, I was jolted into seeing gardens in yet another way on a recent cold afternoon when I visited a new garden in Portland designed by San Francisco landscape architect Topher Delaney.

The garden is a spare and minimalist courtyard between two red-brick wings of the Portland Art Museum. Abstract and figurative bronze sculptures (a dog being the most recognizable) rest on slabs of dark gray concrete. The garden floor is paved in rectangles of dark and light gray stone laid in uneven stripes, dotted with little round metal tables and black wire basket chairs. On a chilly November morning it took some imagination to picture people eating and chatting at those tables on a summer day.

Now In Bloom Camassia are easy-to-grow bulbs that add a jolt of blue to the spring garden. They reward good drainage and a sunny spot by sending up 2-foot-high spikes of star-shaped, yellow-stamened flowers. 'Orion' is a darker blue than the species; 'San Juan Form' has flowers nearly as true-blue as a delphinium.

However, as I sat there half freezing, I came to think that the garden's charms and most of all its purpose were best revealed on a bleak and frosty morning. For it is the garden's severe austerity that causes the sculptures to be revealed as if a spotlight shone upon their planes and contours, animating their essence.

The minimalism of the garden also connects it to the rest of the city. With few distractions, you lift your eyes above the frosted-glass panel walls to the surrounding buildings and neighboring treetops (the museum is along Portland's Park Blocks with majestic shade trees). This sense of linkage to the city is enhanced by two walls of horizontal metal cables that visually open the courtyard to the street and passersby. The garden is so spare and colorless that it sucks in the red brick of the museum walls and the leaves of the trees, offering up these textures for us to enjoy.

And what about plants? Artemisia has never looked so startlingly silver as it does in a black pot by the museum entrance. Three pots in matte black hold bronze flax squeezed by bristly blue junipers. And that is it for plants. You can imagine how they stand out.

I wouldn't say I enjoyed this garden in any of the usual ways. Yet I can hardly wait to go back to see the garden at night when the sculptures and frosted panels are lit by dozens of up-lights. And on a warmer day I want to soak up the sunshine at one of those little tables.

I must not be the only one fascinated by modern gardens. A rash of handsome new books on the subject offers international perspectives that enlarge our ideas of what a garden can be. For startling images and relatively jargon-free text, look at: "The Modern Garden," by Jane Brown (Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), "Portfolio of Contemporary Gardens," by Stephen Woodhams (Quadrille Publishing, 1999) and "The Minimalist Garden," by Christopher Bradley-Hole (Mitchell-Beazley, 2000).

Valerie Easton, a horticultural librarian who writes about plants and gardens for Pacific Northwest magazine, is the co-author of "Artists in Their Gardens" from Sasquatch Books. Her e-mail address is vjeaston@aol.com. Allan Mandell, who photographed gardens for that book, has appeared in publications internationally.