The artful garden can express whimsy, personality and taste
At least a dozen metal suns in myriad colors burst from a side wall in my neighbor’s garden, their warm, happy faces gazing down on a bed of succulents. On an adjacent fence, countless abalone shells cradle rainbows in the morning light. There’s a giant metal bell from an old whaling ship. There are ceramic roosters, glass orbs, wind chimes and a “Frog Crossing” sign peeking out from behind the rhododendrons. And, yes, a smattering of classic flamingos.
Too much? Who’s to say? Gardens are individual, personal. And garden art makes them all the more so, bestowed on the landscape at the beholding eye’s behest.
But there are as many possibilities for adorning a garden as there are shades of salvias, everything from subtle to silly, artsy to animated, funny gnomes to highend fine art from Bay Area sculptors and makers. So we checked in with some local landscapers, gardeners and garden-shop experts for tips and ideas. Still, the root concept remains embedded ... make your garden your own.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a garden with too much art. Too many pots, yes. But art? No,” says Aerin Moore of Magic Gardens Landscaping in Oakland, who has designed gardens and landscapes for 45 years. In his own expansive yard, he has some really big heads scattered around — amazing sculptures from well-known East Bay artist Clayton Thiel.
“When you put art in the garden, and it’s something you really like, it makes the garden more personal,” Moore says. “I used to teach a lot of design classes, and one of the most popular was, ‘Create your own garden paradise.’
I have clients who have picked things up at street fairs, art fairs, just beautiful sculptures on the fences, smaller freestanding sculptures. Some may think it’s a lot, but it’s what they love, and there’s a whole quality to it that’s really nice.”
Indeed, with folks spending more time in their gardens, backyards, atriums and balconies this past restrictive year, enhancing outdoor areas has been a saving grace for our mental health and has served to grow the garden biz to new heights, says Kyli Richardson, manager of the Aptos branch of Dig Gardens.
“Last year, we saw a huge boost in our industry,” she says. “We’ve seen the gear shift more for function — starting your own garden or growing your own food. But also looking at something beautiful, and that’s not just plants. That does include art.”
Sarah V. Lee of Sarah’s Magnifica Designs in Pleasanton agrees. “When garden art is done right, it brings so much joy,” she says. “It’s a creative way to express ourselves, and it’s been especially important during the pandemic, when we needed fun things to do at home.”
GARDEN GUIDELINES
“You need to make sure things are not competing with each other,” Lee says. “Like with any kind of design, you either need a common thread to carry throughout — maybe it’s color or texture or style, like contemporary or rustic — or you need to have enough space in between pieces.”
Lee has upcycled many items herself — turning a discarded bistro chair and an old half fountain into mini succulent gardens, or using old fence boards for a winding “beach boardwalk” path — but she feels using thrift-store items can be overdone. “It’s better not to go overboard with upcycled items. You don’t want it to look like a flea market.”
Carol Maga, a longtime member of the Berkeley Garden Club, which will hold its first ever Art in the Garden Tour in May (more on that in a bit), also feels art should fit the theme of the garden.
“For me, I want to have some thematic consistency with type of garden and type of art,” she says. “I don’t want to walk into an English cottage garden and see a modern sculpture and feel like, uh oh, this is in the wrong yard. But if done right — one garden I know of has huge dinosaurs all through
their succulent and cactus garden, and it works perfectly.”
But some things really fit anywhere, like human figures.
Judi Townsend has populated her garden with mannequins, which is convenient, since she’s the owner of Mannequin Madness, an Oakland shop that sells used mannequins. Many are purchased by artists and transformed into garden art, she says. Townsend has an entire page devoted to the phenomenon on her Pinterest site.
“Mannequins are made out of fiberglass — the same material as surfboards — so they can withstand the elements, which is part of the reason so many people use them in the garden,” Townsend says. “Some people mosaic the mannequins and others paint them to give them an aged patina. They are cheaper and more lightweight than a sculpture made out of concrete. And often, they have a whimsical expression or pose. You can pretty much do anything with them.”
People embed succulents into wire dress forms for a free-standing “vertical” garden,” she says. Or you can use a mannequin hosiery leg to plant herbs.
PLANTS AS ART INSTALLATIONS
Don’t forget — plants themselves can be considered art.
At the Dig store in Aptos, manager Richardson says “living walls” are popular as garden art. “They’re definitely like a major art installation themselves,” she says. “Like a living painting. Kind of outside the realm of, say, a sculpture. And perfect for an urban gardener who is running out of space. Going up on the wall is functional.”
Living walls have been around for a while now, she says, but incorporating plants into the art is a newer thing. “We have examples in both of our locations — wall displays with multiple types of succulents in various colors in designs. It’s really cool when they start to flower, the whole wall explodes with color.”
“There are a lot of plants that are really sculptures themselves,” Magic Gardens’ Moore says. “Tree aloes and some of the palms are really sculptural. Chamaedorea are a really common houseplant palm, but there are a lot of different ones that are really dramatic. We’ve been using them outdoors for a while now.”
PRACTICAL PURPOSE
Art in the garden can also serve a dual purpose. Lee created a “bottle fence” — partly as art and partly to shield her front yard from an adjacent driveway into a business park. It’s made of dozens of blue and green wine bottles — all found items.
“I didn’t drink an ounce of it myself,” Lee says, laughing. “The neighborhood had plenty.”
The design was inspired by a similar fence Lee spotted in Vacaville. “Making it was a labor of love,” she says. “You collect the bottles, take all the labels off. Drilling the bottles is tricky. Each has to be drilled on the bottom. Then you run rods through. We chose copper piping for the rods — I love the contrast of color — but you can use any kind of steel or even PVC pipe. You have to have some woodworking skills to build a frame that will hold up in a storm.
“I like the fact that it’s practical, purposeful,” she says. “We wanted to create a partition and at the same time divert attention from that driveway to my garden.”
Garden walls are indeed popular right now, helping to define “rooms” in a garden space. And they can be created out of anything.
“We’ve done three gardens where we built beautiful walls from rubble found on site, slabs of broken concrete, pavers with different colors, broken statuary heads,” Moore says. “One of our clients actually called them art walls. They’re very artistic, and there’s not anything like them. All built from the rubble and put together by very good masons, so they’re very strong walls. It gives people ideas on what can be done with a wall.”