With garden experts these days urging us to treat our outdoor plots as rooms, the question becomes, "How shall we decorate them?"
Oh, so glad you asked. Fashion changes constantly -- even in garden décor. There's no time for moss to grow in the restless world of floricultural furnishings. You may have fond childhood memories of garden gnomes -- and perhaps they'll have their day in the sun again -- but right now, it's out with the gnomes and in with a statue of Buddha. It's the new American garden essential.
Kay Estey watches garden trends emerge. She produces the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show. To her, one word describes the new American garden: sophistication. "People in the states have become just as sophisticated about gardening as the English and Europeans," she says.
The recent interest in garden décor is led by -- you guessed it -- the baby boomer generation. Boomers, in their great numbers, transform whatever they touch. They have traveled the world, seen its gardens, acquired cosmopolitan tastes and are lavishing money on their home turf, driving the market with their perennial interest in the environment, organics and natural stuff, and their newer interest in transforming homes into high-end cocoons.
Younger generations, too, have taken up gardening. "It's just taken off incredibly," Estey says. "As people get more sophisticated, it seems that the industry follows. Now there's the outdoor kitchen, the outdoor living room, the idea that the garden you create outside is another room in your house."
And like any well-appointed room, you need ways to embellish its natural beauty.
The biggest trends in garden art include the use of sculpture, bold color and recycled materials, Estey says.
Experiment with sculpture
Garden art is big -- especially garden sculpture, and particularly metal sculpture. To get an idea of what the higher-end garden art is like, see the $78,400, handmade metal and glass Circo de Lune screen, the $18,000 life-sized stained glass mosaic horse sculpture and the $90,000 wrought iron Kings Brook driveway gate at HomePortfolio.com.
The more accessible garden-art spectrum includes colorful gazing globes (some are solar-powered and light up after sunset) and a wide variety of hand-crafted garden stakes, says Kathleen Engblom, gift and pottery buyer for Valley Nursery in Poulsbo, Wash. Many gardeners are experimenting with non-garden objects and materials, including the current, inexplicable craze for bowling-ball garden art (examples here, here and here).
Look for garden art in durable materials that stand up to the elements, like Abraxas Crow Company's metal crow sculptures, and recycled wood and metal bicycle sculptures by Scott Jaster. (To see how one woman's passion for garden sculpture art defines her two-and-a-quarter-acre Delaware, Pa., garden, see this video at the Fine Gardening magazine Web site.)
Fountains are an affordable and popular type of sculpture available in a wide variety of styles. A Web search turns up simple, Asia-inspired fountains with organic or geometric lines, and more ornate ones fashioned after classical Italian or Greek sculpture. You can also make your own. EHow.com has instructions for making a garden water feature or a table-top fountain that can be adapted for outdoors.
Be daring with color
The fashion-forward flowerbed is awash in color, color, color. Yes, yes, we realize that flowers are colorful. But they are also ephemeral. Today's garden demands -- and delivers -- color, regardless of the season.
"Gone are the days of gray concrete," says David Lewis, an archeological-illustrator turned trendsetting maker of garden art. "People are exploring more with color."
At their Bainbridge Island, Wash., garden and studio, Lewis and his partner, sculptor and watercolorist George Little, have invented a color-obsessed garden aesthetic, captured in their book, "A Garden Gallery: The Plants, Art, and Hardscape of Little and Lewis." They have defined the movement toward strong, earthy colors in the garden -- aqua, deep cobalt, golds, greens, plums and ochre. They make garden art from painted and stained concrete: deep blue columns that support plants or stand alone; stained and sculpted mirrors; cast and painted bas reliefs and fresco paintings to hang in outdoor rooms; and giant horticultural sculptures to plant right in the elements.
But you don't have to be a professional artist to add color to your own garden. Simply try the following:
- Use a big, colorful pot or urn as a focal point, suggests Engblom of Valley Nursery.
- Consider the all-weather paintings (with five-year warranties) available at a variety of outlets, from Target to hardware stores and nurseries.
- Use exterior latex house paint to color a wall -- whether it is a wall of your home, a fence or any other structure that encloses the garden. A colorful, painted wall "makes a beautiful effect with leaves or pots or sculptures in front of it," says Little.
- Be brave with flower colors, too. "Orange used to be a no-no," says Engblom, "and now orange is used as a color to make things pop."
- Integrate your outdoor living space with your home by bringing colors from the interior outside. Don't feel you must spend scads of money to get a delicious, artistic effect. New metal-wood paints like Benjamin Moore's Iron Clad Metal & Wood, a latex-based enamel, can be mixed up in any of a paint company's line of decorator colors. Paint an Adirondack chair blue or purple or pink, the color of your house trim or of your living rooms walls. Slap color on a treasure from the beach or a favorite item rescued on its way to the dump. Place it artfully among plants and see how it changes the bed. If you don't like it, toss it out and try again. "It's only paint," says Little.
- For a weathered look that's perfect outdoors, apply paint to your objet d'art, let it set briefly, then rub it off (gently) with a rag.
Make art from recycled materials
Give an imaginative second life to recycled materials through your garden. Recycling is one of the hottest trends at garden shows, according to Estey.
Matthew Levesque, program director and master of recycled art at the non-profit San Francisco company Building REsources often gives free workshops at garden shows on how to make art from cast-offs. He makes it sound easy: Start with an idea of what you want to accomplish, he says. Do you want to create a garden "room" amid the plants and beds? Bring definition and atmosphere to a patio? Insert color and structure in a garden bed? For ideas on where to get supplies, picture the material you'll need, then imagine the trade that uses it. "You think to yourself, 'Who would have this left over?'" Levesque says. He calls it shopping in reverse.
Levesque loves skeleton plates -- big, pierced sheets of metal from which shapes have been laser cut. He finds them by searching the yellow pages under "laser cutting" or "water cutting." You can reuse the plates vertically in gates, as artist Royce Carlson does, as screens or dividers, or use them flat, as table tops. Or, lay them right on the ground, with short puffs of grasses or low groundcover plants in the holes.
A favorite find was an old water heater stranded along the roadside. "My children are always embarrassed when I jump out of the car. They slide down into the back seat and cover their heads as I go bounding across four lanes of traffic," he says. "My wife is used to it. She's like, 'What now?' "
From the heater, he extracted "the most marvelously painted, totally curvaceous" baffles in colors of crimson, ochre and brown. He collects them now, planting them upright in a part of the garden where nothing blooms. "Think of a stand of some sort of rusty grass," he says appreciatively. "Every time we see a water heater now, it's like, boom! I'm on it."
To find a used-materials store near you, check the members' directory of the Building Materials Reuse Association. And then get cracking with some of the following ideas:
- Old Victorian doors are gorgeous in a garden. Plant them upright as screens or "walls" for a garden room. Hinge or pin several together in a zig-zag, like a folding screen. Old windows and doors can also be fence panels or a gate: use them horizontally or vertically or both in the same project. A big, ornate, vertical window makes an airy garden partition.
- Multiples of cast-offs are great as they can be grouped. Levesque tells of a gardener who collected colorful old broomsticks -- "the reds, the blues, the apple greens." He sawed off the brooms and planted the poles in rows, as an open divider between garden spaces and a beautiful installation of tall, vertical color.
- Cast-offs can be used to create more elaborate sculptures, as with works by artists commissioned by NorCalWaste Systems, a Northern California trash hauler.
- Hardscaping (the part of the garden that's not plants) offers lots of opportunities to re-use discarded materials. Make paths from marble and other stone that you have broken up and interplanted with low groundcover plants. If the stone surface is slippery, flip it over to expose the rougher underside. Levesque makes foot paths from "gravel" made of tumbled old glass or ceramics. He also uses old conveyor belts on paths: "They are extremely durable. They are designed to carry rocks and gravel. You can cut them into all kinds of shapes."
- Use pieces of scrap metal or scrap wood as pavers. Nail discarded two-by-fours onto the bottom of wood scraps to build little boxes in various shapes, each about the size of a stepping stone. The result: a "beautiful, angular raised and lowered walkway."
- Create partitions and outdoor galleries by planting two upright posts and running a piece of pipe between them. From it, hang a collection of driftwood, or toys, or other treasures. For a flower and garden show, Levesque planted a pole and hung strands of clothesline from it, each ending in a pair of four-inch glass discs (lenses from light fixtures) with a leaf skeleton suspended between them.
- Make container gardens from the flattish, glass light-fixture shades that were popular in the '60s and '70s, the type that screw directly onto a ceiling mount ("Old rental apartments used to be famous for them," says Levesque). Plant them with sedums or ivy.
The new garden, the experts say, is less about using a few pieces of art in the garden than about transforming your garden itself into a work of art through which you express yourself.
By Marilyn Lewis
