A whale of a garden
Itchy Acres artists open up their sculpture-filled compounds for tour
Artists don’t have to be gardeners to create unique and fascinating yards.
Carter Ernst and Paul Kittelson’s three-quarters of an acre in Independence Heights, north of Garden Oaks, was a scary place when they bought the property for $40,000 nearly 30 years ago. The ramshackle two-story house had broken and boarded-up windows.
But Ernst and Kittelson, both sculptors, were thrilled to have somewhere to display their large inventory of often cumbersome outdoor pieces.
Never mind that the yard was an overgrown jungle so full of giant ropes of poison ivy they jokingly called the place Itchy Acres. (It wasn’t so funny, really; their friend Jack Massing had to be hospitalized after digging up some of the abundant Spanish dagger yuccas for his own place.)
Itchy Acres will never have a fancy entry sign, but the name stuck as
Ernst and Kittelson’s friends bought adjacent properties, creating an informal community of home and studio compounds. The enclave filled with like-minded Houston artists, mostly sculptors who came of age in the 1980s. They tend to be handy with materials like steel and concrete, fearless welders and carpenters; and they’re in it together when a neighbor needs help with heavy lifting.
Still relatively hidden among industrial businesses and some semirural lots, six Itchy Acres properties will open their gates Saturday for the Garden Conservancy’s annual Houston Open Day tour.
The tour also features gardens in West University Place, the Heights and Spring Branch. Each purposeful, they include a sustainable showplace with an impressive rainwater collection system, a shady yard with a small “polinator café” and a certified wildlife habitat.
None are traditional, formal gardens, explained Frank Brown, the Curtis and Windham landscape designer who coordinates the tour. “The theme is kind of, ‘What is a garden?’ ”
The Garden Conservancy, a national organization, splits the tour proceeds locally with Hempstead’s nonprofit Peckerwood Garden, a visionary landscape full of rare plants from around the world.
Native plants and succulents from Peckerwood will be for sale at sculptor Ed and Magda Wilson’s place in Itchy Acres, where that portion of the tour begins. Although it contains multiple gardens, Itchy Acres counts as just one stop — a great bang for the garden tourist’s buck.
All of the yards there feature sculptures by the resident artists.
“We’re gardeners by default,” Ernst said as she and Kittelson walked me through their compound. “We enjoy going out in the backyard, but we really consider it a backdrop for the art.”
Except for clearing the poison ivy, they try to let nature run its course. They have carved out tamer spaces with island beds and borders near the house and their two studios.
The highlight, gardenwise, is the bog and fountain cradled into Kittelson’s 45-foot “Whale” sculpture — a steel structure covered in mesh screen. A door leads into the belly of the beast, where there are tables, chairs and even a grill — an ingenious screened-in patio. The concrete-lined pond and bog are lined with rocks from a family property in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Kittelson and Olin Calk created “Whale” in 1987 for the parking lot of an art gallery on Portsmouth Street. Made in three sections, so it could be moved with a small truck, it then migrated to Buffalo Bayou and White Street Studios before Kittelson and Ernst settled into Itchy Acres. “Here, it was perfect,” Ernst said. “We have a lot of mosquitoes because of all these woods.”
Kittelson said he copied the bog and pond idea from Wilson. He and Ernst also created a more natural wetlands pond farther back in their yard, in a low spot that didn’t drain well.
Although she raised cleome from seed this winter that’s already blooming, most of the plants the couple have added to their landscape are trouble-free perennials and natives. “If they don’t survive, too bad,” said Kittelson. “You end up with hardier plants that way.”
Last winter’s unusually hard and long freeze killed a large queen palm the couple loved and have recently replaced with a much smaller specimen. And they lost a large oak tree near Ernst’s studio this year to insects and disease.
They took the stump down only to ground level, leaving a polished outline of the tree’s shapely bottom. “It makes a good sculpture base, but we really miss that shade,” Ernst said.
A big lespideza shrub, that will soon be a mounded shower of lavender blossoms, is already coming back from this winter’s hard freeze. (Its botanical name, appropriately, is thunbergii ‘Little Volcano.’) In the meantime, a couple of roses next to it are blooming and happy.
Sculptures, like the plants there, either survive the elements or disappear. But Ernst and Kittelson make sturdy stuff. Sculptures are scattered throughout the property, often almost hidden, so finding them all is like a treasure hunt — and a retrospective of the two artists’ long careers.
Those who follow Houston’s art scene may recognize some iconic works, including one of the “Mindless Competition” figures Kittelson first displayed on the lawn of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. His “Existential Ladder,” a 50-foot tower of aluminum extension ladders, however, is almost site-specific.
“It blows down, then I put it back up and make it taller and stronger,” he explained. “It’s my least public work; it’s so impractical. There’s nowhere you can put this thing. It’s a little unwieldy.”
Ernst’s works are recognizable for their animal shapes, sometimes in a wild mix of materials. (Most recently, she’s focused on smaller ceramics.)
Eagle-eyed visitors also will notice old art cars and Kittelson’s working “VW BBQ” grill. Their back gate meets the back gates of three of the other properties.
Tim and Mary Glover didn’t create their more open, manicured lawn by choice: Their lot was previously a builder’s dirt depot. They leveled an elevated space for their home and studios, also planting trees and shrubs.
But don’t get the idea that it’s too citified. Next door, turkeys gobble from a coop and a couple of cows occupy a muddy pen on a property that looks like a rural remnant. On the other side of the Glovers, directly behind Kittelson and Ernst, Dr. Karen Gerlach and Dr. Steven Lesser are Itchy Acres’ most recent arrivals. They pieced together three lots. All are open on the tour.