The Garden as ART

While sitting by the riverside with a blogger, the subject garden as art came briefly up in the conversation.
Why can’t a garden be a piece of art? There are many and many more examples of gardens as artistic expression.
When you enter an art-college you will not find any courses to become an artist in the media gardening, is that a reason to not see a garden as a way to express yourself artistically?

For 27 years now the Garden Festival at Chaumont-Sur-Loire shows, you sure can create a garden as a piece of art.
24 small gardens from around 100 square metre are create according to a theme, last year theme was ‘Flower Power’
As in any other exhibition you see several artistic expressions of the exhibition title.
Last your i was there.

Perhaps it is the sheer 1000 ways of gardening that scares people of, maybe.
One garden that has been excepted by the art community, including art colleges, is the garden by filmmaker Derek Jarman.
He created against all odds an amazing garden, he was no gardener had little knowledge. He went along in the locale landscape and collected rocks, wood, old iron and created. A poem appeared on the site of the cottage as a part of the garden.

There are so many, many and even more ways to use natural material to create a piece of art in the frame of a garden.
An other famous piece of work at the other site of the spectrum of scale is the garden from Charles Jencks with the title Garden of Cosmic Speculation.
He went ahead with the bigger machines to create a new concept for landscaping and created art. You can see it like a sculpture where you can walk inside and what you never can see at once.

 

 

We are not talking here of a sculpture in the garden but the garden as a sculpture, a garden is 3 dimensional.
The art can be minimum using just 6 trees to express more than just an image. Artist Jaume Plensa used poetry, trees and brons to create a small minimum garden which will grow steady on, The Heart of Trees.

 

 

The new trend, in gardening is vertical gardens, using space optimal.
Italian artists used vertical gardening to express Flower Power in a colourful way.
Entering the garden you see white flowering plants in white cubes in walls and at the back a reflection of colours in metal.

Walk and turn and you see the other site of the walls planted in colours. The title was “Monochrome Blanc” and my favourite of the 24.

Number two was the Hot planet garden from Alexis Tricoire, who explored the power of plants to survive the heating up from our planet.

A garden as art will always change and grow. When you let it go and grow it will fall apart to create natures own expression of emotions. Perhaps therefor people don’t want it as art, you can’t hang it in a museum for generations to come to admire the same picture year after year, century after century.
When you leave the garden it will appear again like a lost message in time, revealing what once was lost.

When you have a garden create a space no matter how small to do something artistic, forget all the norms and regulations.
No garden, no problem use any bowl to create the same.

Not a sculpture in the garden but the garden being the sculpture.

Like any other art it will take time to learn, to get to know the material you want to work with.